.; I../ ;_•;■■:, .j;_ 



• '■'''■■. ...»v: ■ . 



;*, •;;•■='- \ x 






' . : ." <.' 



'.-■^m'<: 



^:l•;^ 



r r 4,. 



"ti J. 






I 



FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Conflict of Religiotsts in the Early Roman Empire 

Life and Letters in the Fourth Century 

Virgil 

Poets and Puritans 



FROM 
PERICLES TO PHILIP 



BY 

T. R. GLOVER 

FELLOW AND LECTURER OF ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
AND UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN ANCIENT HISTORY 



NEW YORK 

THE MAGMILLAN COMPANY 

1917 



/ n &3 



C2 

i v6 



TO 

RENDEL HARRIS 

ESSE SUl DEDERAT MONUMENTUM 
ET PIGNUS AMORIS 



PREFACE 

THE period from Pericles to Philip is in many 
ways the most interesting of Greek history. 
Indeed, when we use the word ** Greek" — 
whether we think of art or literature, of philosophy or 
politics, of the Greek spirit or of the Greek attitude to 
life — nine times out of ten we are turning, consciously 
or unconsciously, to the century and a quarter between 
the birth of Pericles and the accession of Philip. It is 
because in all the regions of thought and life, which I 
have named, the formative impulses come from this time, 
or reach maturity in it, recognize themselves or are 
recognized in it. But, if we are to understand history, 
we have to ask, more carefully than we sometimes do, 
what are the things that matter. In the perspective of 
time, for instance, how many events of the decade 1850- 
60 are yet of such consequence as the publication of 
The Origin of Species, or have meant so much to 
mankind? Lecky spoke of John Wesley's conversion 
as an epoch in English history. Can we imagine 
the comment of Horace Walpole, or of Dr. Johnson 
himself, on such a criticism, if it had been made by 
a contemporary? Yet it is hard to say that Lecky 
was not right. But do the histories as a rule give us 
such events in a perspective, that will bring out their 
significance ? 



viii FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

The significant events are not deposited in History 
naked and solitary, like the boulders shed by the ice- 
floes on the Southern shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 
They come into being in a society with an atmosphere 
of its own ; and that also is of signal importance, if we 
are to understand the events. As a rule, they are apt 
also to be associated somehow with the personality of 
some man, who in some creative way has helped to 
make the atmosphere of his day, or who has perhaps 
reacted against it and becomes himself the impulse for 
the age following or even for many generations and 
many races. 

The object proposed in this volume is, by attention 
to Greek life, not in the abstract, but as we find it in 
traveller and poet, in critic and statesman, as it shows 
itself in education and the axioms of conduct, in the 
market and the household, as well as to the political 
ideas and the decisive events, national and international, 
to come nearer to an understanding of the period. The 
relations of Greece with Persia, in particular, are at this 
time so vital, and, as a rule, have received so little atten- 
tion beyond side-references in English histories of Greece, 
that a chapter has been given to Persia, in which, for 
once, Greece itself plays the second part — second, because, 
if Persia is the decisive factor in the political history of 
Greece, Greece is no less for Persia. I have to thank 
Professor E. G. Browne for his kindness in reading and 
mending this chapter. I have also to thank my cousin, 
Mr. F. B. Glover, for expert criticism on my attempt 
to deal with Athenian shipping and banking. 

Three chapters of the book were given, in whole 
or in part, as Library Lectures in Haverford College, 



PREFACE ix 

Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1912. The rest has been 
written since then, partly before and partly after the 
beginning of the war. Since I sent the manuscript to 
the publisher, many months have passed ; the delay was 
inevitable ; and as I have read the proofs I have found 
new links of sympathy with the men of whom I wrote. 
Their experience is strangely like what ours has been 
and will be — the strain of a long war, the readjustment of 
all life to conditions that raise question and doubt, the 
endeavour to re-found society and to find anew a base 
from which the soul can make all its own again. Much 
that I wrote has been given for me a new meaning ; some 
allusions, so quick in these last months has been the march 
of events, seem out of date already. But a true record 
of human experience is never irrelevant, and the period 
from Pericles to Philip had above all others great natures 
and master intellects to interpret it. I hope that my 
attempt to survey once more what they left may be 
found honest and sympathetic, and that it may lead some 
to read them again, and perhaps induce in others a 
quieter reconsideration of what Greek studies have 
always meant to us. 

Cambridge, Aprils 19 17 



CONTENTS 



I. The Traveller in the Greek 


World . . i 


II. The Age of Pericles . 


• 37 


III. Thucydides 


. 60 


IV. Athens in the War-Time 


. 96 


V. Euripides. 


. 136 


VI. The Youth of Xenophon 


. 163 


VII. Persia . . 


. 197 


VIII. The Anabasis . 


• 235 


IX. The New Age . 


. 267 


X. The House of Pasion . 


. 302 


XI. Country Life 


• 337 


XII. Under which King, Bezonian? 


. 363 


Index . . . . 


. 401 



FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

CHAPTER I 
tHE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 

GOETHE and Eckermann were once talking about 
Schlegel, and his criticisms of Euripides came up, and 
Goethe, as frequently happened, said something that 
Eckermann carried home with him and wrote down. *' If a 
modern man like Schlegel," said Goethe, *' must pick out 
faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon 
his knees." Goethe is profoundly right ; the great vice in 
criticism of ancient literature is that the critic seems more 
often anxious to find out what is wrong than what is right. 
Something must be very right indeed in a man's work if it can 
hold and delight mankind centuries after he is dead and gone, 
and not only his fellow-countrymen, but every foreigner also, 
who can even with a lexicon's aid pick out his meaning and 
who has, consciously or unconsciously, any idea of what a 
book is. For it is only to the sympathetic, to those who 
somehow have the right instinct, that a book will reveal itself. 
Books are strange things and have strange ways — like certain 
insects, when they feel themselves in wrong hands, they will 
sham dead. With the great writers of ancient Greece this 
often happens, and men say they are dull, and find faults in 
them ; but when they reach the right hands, they change 
and live and move, and even the barest minimum of Greek 
will let the right man see that they too are right, and life 
begins anew with all its gladness and variety. 

Herodotus is an author who has suffered terrible things 
from clever critics in ancient days and in our own. But if 
ever a writer gave delight to his readers, held their attention, 



2 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and won their affection, it is Herodotus ; so that it seems 
clear that he must be more than Plutarch and Professor Sayce 
would suggest. This chapter will be devoted to the discovery, 
so far as is possible, of some of those features of his work and 
character that have stood the test of time, and have endeared 
him to his readers. 

We might begin by speaking of the width of his interests 
and of his sympathies. He is so intensely human that nothing 
that touches human life, nothing that quickens men's thoughts, 
or makes their hearts beat, fails to appeal to him. All the 
business of all the world is his, and he enjoys it. If, like 
Greeks of his day, he thinks of human life in the abstract, he 
may share their doubts of it. " Short as life is," says Arta- 
banus, ** there is no man so happy, no man among all these, 
nor anywhere else, to whom it will not come often, and not 
once only, to wish to die rather than to live " (vii. 46). *' Not 
to be born is, past all prizing, best," said Herodotus' friend, 
Sophocles {O.C. 1227) — or rather, so says the chorus in the 
play of Sophocles, for Sophocles was a poet, and a poet draws 
many conclusions from life, and in a certain sense the more 
inconsistent they are the better. But if Herodotus sighs with 
Artabanus, when he thinks of life in the abstract, when he 
comes to actual life, whether it is only the bandages the Persians 
use with the wounded (vii. 181) or the horns of the cattle 
which the Libyans keep (iv. 183), whether it is the strange 
practice of making butter that prevails among the Scythians 
(iv. 2) or the sugar-making — honey, he calls it — of the Libyans, 
who smear themselves red and eat monkeys (" and they have 
plenty of monkeys in their mountains," iv. 194) — life is too 
interesting to be sighed over. There then is one element of 
his great charm — *' the world's no blot for him, nor blank," 
but various and bright with life, always something to catch 
the eye and to wake the mind. 

Herodotus is thoroughly Greek here. '' Oh ! Solon ! 
Solon ! " says the old Egyptian in the Timaeus (22 b), *' you 
Greeks are always children . . . you are all young in your 
souls." It is a true judgment. Young they all were in soul, 
busy, curious, and open-eyed, till they found out how great 
they were, and grew didactic and dull. 

The open eye and heart of Herodotus call down on him 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 3 

the anger of Plutarch—'' he is such a lover of barbarians ! " 1 
(ovTO) Be ^Lko^dp^ap6<; iariv) — he says the Greeks learnt 
their cults from the Egyptians, that Thales was Phoenician by 
descent, and Isagoras Carian ; he makes Artemisia queen of 
Halicarnassus, " his own countr3Avoman," more gifted with 
foresight than Themistocles ; and he persistently diminishes 
the glory of the Greeks— Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea, it is 
all the same story ; and finally he says that the Persians at 
the battle of Plataea were not inferior in spirit or courage to 
the Spartans. He loves barbarians ; beware of him, says 
Plutarch — " the man can write and draw you pictures ; his 
tale is charming ; there is grace and cunning and beauty in 
his narratives ... he beguiles and leads astray," and by 
reviling and insinuation he lessens the glory of Hellas. So 
Plutarch stands up to him " for our ancestors and for truth." 2 
That Herodotus should be accused of making his readers think 
ill of the Greeks comes strangely to us, till we remember that 
Plutarch and his contemporaries were exceedingly sensitive to 
the criticism of the Romans and uncomfortable about any 
gap in their armour. But his blame for Herodotus as a friend 
of the foreigner points surely to another element in Herodotus' 
greatness. 

Herodotus was perhaps helped to this power of under- 
standing men of alien speech and alien thought by the very 
circumstances of his birth and upbringing. Halicarnassus, his 
birthplace, was a Dorian colony from Troezen, planted long 
ago in Caria (vii. gg).^ As in many of the Greek cities of Asia 
Minor there was a strong infusion of Carian blood in the 
people, and Halicarnassus was in a sense a town apart, ex- 
cluded from the common worship of the Dorian cities, its 
neighbours (i. 144). It is noteworthy that critical as Herodotus 
frankly is of " lonians," for Carians he has perhaps no unkind 
word. That he should write an Ionic dialect seemed to later 
Greeks to need explanation, and in Suidas' lexicon, which 

1 Note also the quite friendly tone of Herodotus in referring to 
Greek exiles ^mong the Persians— ^.g. Demaratus. Cf. Thucydides 
on Alcibiades and Tissaphernes. 

2 Plut. de malignitate Herodoti, §§ 12, 13, 15, 23, 38, 43, and i. 

» The tradition at least was that Troezen was the mother-city 
See How and Wells, ad loc. ; also on i. 144, 145. 



4 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

belongs to the tenth century a.d., we are told that he learnt 
the dialect in exile at Samos. But from the evidence of 
inscriptions modern scholars draw another conclusion — that 
Herodotus learnt his dialect in his own home from his mother 
and his nurse, and spoke it from childhood.^ It is a curious 
coincidence that the other great contemporary historian of 
Greece had foreign blood in his veins. 

It is interesting to see how Herodotus looks back to his 
native land. The lonians *' had the fortune to build their 
cities in the most favourable position for climate and seasons of 
any men we know " ; ^ and the Dorians were not far away. 
Herodotus is constantly interested in climates — the Eg57ptians, 
he says, are the most healthy of men after the Libyans, partly, 
he thinks, because of their seasons which do not change, for 
diseases are most apt to be produced by changes of seasons 
(ii. 77) ; but after all, while the ends of the earth have allotted 
to them by nature the fairest things — ^gold, cotton, frankincense, 
and so forth— it is the lot of Hellas to have its seasons far more 
fairly tempered than other lands (iii. 106, 107).^ As for the 
Carians, they gave the Hellenes three warlike inventions — crests 
on helmets, devices on shields, and handles instead of straps to 
hold shields with (i. 171) ; and when the lonians first secured 
the opening of Egypt for the Hellenes, there were Carians with 
them, bronzen men (ii. 152). Men of war they remained, not 
easily to be conquered even by the Persians.* The Persian king 
might be suzerain, but the queen or king at Halicarnassus was 
half independent. And if we turn to ways of peace, we learn 
that the old Ionian dress of the women was really Carian, '* for 
the old Hellenic fashion of dress for women was everywhere 
the same as that we now call Dorian " (v. 88). 

In this Dorian-Carian town, looking from its headland 
across the sea, Herodotus was born {c. 484 B.C.), and there he 
grew up, with open ears, we can well believe, from earliest 

1 Cf. Meyer, Forsch. i. 197 ; Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, 649 ff. 

2 i. 142. Cf. Strabo, c. 656, on climate of Halicarnassus and its 
influence ; also Pausanias, vii. 5.4; Radet, La Lydie, p. 48. 

* Cf. dictum of Cyrus on relation of land and men, ix. 122 ; and 
vii. 5, the fair land of Europe and its fruit trees. 

* V. 119-121. Carians, XcvKacnrib^s (Xen. Hellenica, iii. 2, 15). The 
Persians, because of their crested helmets, called them ak^Krpvoves (Plut. 
Artax. 10). 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 5 

boyhood, for the tales of the men of Halicarnassus — how 
Agasicles won the tripod at the games of Triopian Apollo and 
brought it home against the Dorian rules (i. 144) ; how Phanes, 
a man capable in judgment and valiant in war, served with 
King Amasis in Egypt, till he quarrelled with the king and 
fled on shipboard and was caught, but not brought back, for he 
made his guards drunk, and escaped to Persia, and how he 
helped King Cambyses across the desert on his march to Egypt, 
and of the horrible vengeance the other Greek mercenaries in 
Egypt took upon him and were then beaten in battle (iii. 4, 11) ; 
and how Xeinagoras, son of Prexilaos, saved the life of the 
brother of King Xerxes and laid up thanks for himself with 
Xerxes, and became ruler of all Cilicia by the gift of the King 
(ix. 107). But the most famous of all was Queen Artemisia, 
daughter of Lygdamis, wisest of the counsellors of Xerxes. 

" Of the rest of the officers," Herodotus wrote long after, 
" I make no mention (since I am not bound to do so), but only 
of Artemisia, at whom most of all I marvel that she took part 
in the expedition against Hellas, though a woman ; for after 
her husband died, she held the power herself, and, although 
she had a son who was a young man, she went on the expedition, 
impelled by high spirit and manly courage, no necessity being 
laid upon her. Now her name, as I said, was Artemisia, and 
she was the daughter of Lygdamis, and by descent she was of 
Halicarnassus on her father's side, and on her mother's a 
Cretan. She commanded the men of Halicarnassus and Kos 
and Nisjnros and Calydna, furnishing five ships ; and of all the 
fleet, after those of the Sidonians, her ships Were counted the 
best ; and of all his allies she set forth the best counsels to the 
King " (vii. 99). 

There was another Lygdamis of whom Herodotus must have 
heard a good deal in his youth, though he does not mention him. 
For Artemisia left a son called Pisindelis, and this man's son 
Lygdamis was tyrant or king of Halicarnassus in his turn. 
And here we depend on the lexicon of Suidas, and whence that 
work derived its information we do not know, but much of it 
can only have come in the long run from Halicarnassus itself. 

There was then in Halicarnassus a man named Panyasis, 
son of Polyarchus, a " seer of signs " and a poet, who revived 
epic poetry which had now well-nigh died down to ashes. He 



6 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

had a brother called Lyxes, or a sister Rhoio — more probably 
the former perhaps ; and Lyxes married a woman with a Doric 
name, Dry 6, and had two sons, Herodotus and Theodorus — 
theophoric names, both with a hint of piety. The family was 
one of the better sort {tmu e7n<^av(ov) } Panyasis wrote an 
epic on Herakles, which some put next Homer, and others after 
Hesiod and Antimachos, a good deal lower down. For what- 
ever reason Lygdamis saw fit to kill the poet ; and we read 
that the poet's nephew, and no doubt such others of the family 
as could get away, removed to Samos. Later on Herodotus 
€ame back to Halicarnassus and drove out the tyrant, but 
afterwards he found himself the object of some ill-will among 
the citizens, and voluntarily went to Thurii, which the Athenians 
were then planting. And Suidas concludes with the statement 
that some say he died there and is buried in the market-place, 
and others that he died in Pella in Macedonia, for there was 
a story, which Suidas quotes elsewhere, that Herodotus and 
HeUanicus lived for a while together at the court of Amyntas, 
successor of that Alexander of Macedon for whom Herodotus 
betrays so kindly a feeling in his story. 

All this is open to question, but several things are definitely 
known. Herodotus clearly lived in Samos at some time or 
other, as his close acquaintance with the stories of Polycrates 
and other Samians ^ shows — ^he even gives the name of the artist 
who made the famous ring, Theodorus, the son of Telecles 
(iii. 41), one of the two men who introduced brassfounding into 
Greece (i. 51) ; and he pauses (iii. 60) to speak with admiration 
of three works at Samos, greater than any made by Hellenes — viz. 
the temple of Hera, the largest temple known, first designed by 
Rhoecus, son of Philes, a Samian, and spared by the Persians on 
the suppression of the Ionic Revolt ; the mole round the 
harbour, twenty fathoms deep and more than two furlongs in 
length ; and the famous tunnel which carried the water seven 
furlongs through the mountain ridge. The tunnel is mentioned 

1 This view is held by E. Meyer, Forsch, i. 193, and Busolt, who 
find in Herodotus' remark (ii. 143), koX ifxol ov yeverjXoyrja-avTi efjeavrop, a 
suggestion that he could have unfolded a pedigree — i.e. was of the old 
nobility. 

2 For example, the Samians who distinguished themselves in the 
Persian side in the battle of Salamis (viii. 85) and were rewarded by 
Xerxes. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 7 

nowhere else in ancient literature, and all trace of it was lost till 
1878, when it was found by accident, and some part of it cleared 
and restored.^ 

That Lygdamis had trouble with his subjects or fellow- 
citizens was in any case likely, and it is proved by an inscrip- 
tion now in the British Museum, which Sir Charles Newton 
found at Halicarnassus.^ Scholars date the stele between 
460 and 455 B.C. It contains an agreement between Lygdamis 
and the citizens of Halicarnassus and Salmakis, relative to the 
return of exiles and their reinstatement in their lands and houses. 
A tribute-list setting forth payments made by her allies to 
Athens in the year 454 B.C. mentions the Halicarnassians 
among other tributaries — evidence that Lygdamis was gone.^ 
What part Herodotus had or had not in all these transactions 
can only be guessed. 

But there is no doubt about his sentiments as to tyrants. 
In a famous passage in his Third Book there stands the dis- 
cussion of the Persian nobles, who overthrew the false Smerdis, 
as to the type of government it would be well to establish. 
Otanes pleads for Democracy.* " Monarchical power,'* he 
urges, " would set even a good man outside the ordinary 
thoughts " — that sense of limitation and restriction which 
works for sanity in ordinary intercourse. Plato's myth of 
the ring that made Gyges invisible shows how Gyges got 
outside ordinary thoughts. '* A tyrant disturbs the customs 
handed down from of old, he does violence to women, and he 
puts men to death without trial. On the other hand," continues 
Otanes, ** the rule of the many has a name which is the most 
beautiful of names. Equality " (irpcorov fxev ovvo^a iravTCDv koX- 
Xiarov e')(6i iaovo/jLLTjv). A German scholar, Maass, has suggested 
that the whole discussion was quietly taken from Protagoras. 
Eduard Meyer emphatically rejects this : " Maass makes him 
outright a Dummkopf." Herodotus himself found the story 
challenged, for in another passage he refers to people who 

^ Cf . Michaelis, ArchcBological Discoveries, p. 187; H. F. Tozer, 
Islands of the Aegaean, ch. viii. ; J. Irving Manatt, Aegaean Days, 
p. 206. 

* Hicks and Hill, Greek Inscr., No. 27. 
^ Hicks and Hill, Greek Inscr., No. 2^. 

* Herodotus, iii. 80. 



8 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

would not believe such a debate had taken place, and he 
produces another fact which he says will astonish them (vi. 43). 
He evidently believed the story himself. ^ It probably came 
from some of those Persian friends to whom, as we shall see, 
he owes a great deal of important information, for there were 
Philhellenes among the Persians as well as among the Egyptians. 

But the strong, wholesome democratic flavour of the advice 
of Otanes is clearly to the historian's mind. When he tells 
of the liberation of Athens from her tyrants, and then of her 
great victory on one and the same day over Boeotians and 
Chalcidians (506 B.C.), and cites the inscription recalling it,^ 
he goes on to add : " It is evident not by one instance only, 
but in every way, that Eqaslity '(lo-rjryopir}) is a good thing 
(airov^alov) ; for the Athenians, while they were under 
tyrants, were not better in war than any of their neighbours, 
but, once rid of the tyrants, they became far -the first. . . . 
When once they had been set free, each was eager to achieve 
something for himself" (v. 78). ^ Yet the other two speeches 
in the Persians' discussion show that Herodotus was not 
blind to the drawbacks of Democracy — few thoughtful lovers 
of it are — nor blind to the advantages of aristocracy and 
monarchy. The many tyrants mentioned in his pages fare 
well at his hands ; he is far too much interested in them to 
be angry with them. Herodotus believed that on the whole 
more could be made of life under a democracy ; so he was a 
democrat and a friend of Athens.* 

That he took part in the colonization of Thurii is established 
on the evidence of Aristotle and Plutarch and the general 
belief of antiquity ; and it is confirmed by his full knowledge 
of persons and places in Italy and Sicily. To illustrate the 

^ Grundy {Persian War, p. 266) remarks that Herodotus had " a 
certain amount of critical acumen which the extreme simpHcity of his 
language has a tendency to conceal." 

^ Two_ fragments of if survive, which prove that he saw it in a restored 
form. 

3 Meyer, Forsch. ii. 226. 

* A strong love of liberty and democracy is not incompatible with 
indifference as to the particular constitutional arrangements a demo- 
cratic community uses at one time or another. Herodotus seems not 
very clear as to Athenian strategoi and archons, and wrong as to the 
naukraroi (v. 71 ; vi. 109). 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 9 

general shape and lie of the Tauric Chersonese he compares 
it to the promontory of Sunium — " for him, however, who has 
not sailed along this part of the coast of Attica, I will make 
it clear by another comparison : — ^it is as if in lapygia another 
race and not the lapygians had cut off for themselves and 
were holding that extremity of the land which is bounded 
by a line beginning at the harbour of Brentesion and running 
to Taras " (iv. 99). He has tales which he could only have 
learnt, one might say, among the Italiot Greeks — of Democedes, 
the Crotoniate physician, who was held in such high honour 
at the court of Darius, and what difficulty he had in getting 
away, and of the message he sent to the king that he was 
married to the daughter of Milon, " for the wrestler Milon had 
a great name at the king's court " (iii. 125-138) ; of Dionysius, 
who, after the collapse of the lonians at the battle of Lade, 
escaped to Sicily and commenced pirate, plundering " none 
of the Greeks at all, but Carthaginians and Etruscans " (vi. 17) ; 
of Carthaginian invaders of Sicily and the house of Gelon 
at Syracuse ; and of the terrible battle in which the Tarentines 
and their allies from Rhegium lost so many men, the latter 
three thousand, while of the Tarentines there was no numbering 
made — in fact, " the greatest slaughter of Hellenes that we 
know " (vii. 170). 

Thus far authority takes us — the youth at Halicarnassus, 
the troublous times under the tyrant, and the disastrous 
settlement at Thurii, for the colony was one of Pericles' failures. ^ 
And what happened next ? That is a problem as soon as we 
touch detail. Thurii was planted in 443 B.C., and Herodotus 
mentions one or two occurrences in the first two or three 
years of the Peloponnesian War. If we allow him fifteen 
years of life after his becoming a Thurian, it is probably all 
he had. Where we suppose he went depends on a good many 
things, and there is a good deal of choice. There is his great 
history and there are his travels — each must have taken a 
long time. Did he make his travels before he went to Thurii, 
or after — always disallowing the mean suggestion that a good 

* Thurii : Meyer, Gr. Gesch. iv. 24 ; Diod. Sic. xi. 90, xii. 9 ff., after 
Timaeus (a Sicilian) ; Strabo, c. 263 ; Plut. Pericles, 1 1 ; Nicias, 5 ; 
Aristophanes, Nuh. 332 ; Aristotle, Pol. v. 3, 12, p. 1303 a; 7, 9, 12, 
p. 1307, a, b. 



10 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

many of his journeys were in other men's books ? When and 
where did he write his own nine books, and which did he 
write first ? Did he begin with Book vii., the expedition of 
Xerxes, and write the others after an interval, in which he 
travelled ? A good many other questions are bound up with 
these. 

A certain tone, for instance, is to be felt in Books vii. to ix., 
when Herodotus writes of the gods and other divine beings 
and their part in the war, which is missed in the earlier books. 
Does it imply that Herodotus was an orthodox believer when 
he wrote the war of Xerxes, that he afterwards travelled, and 
in Egypt became involved in speculations which warred 
against a conventional orthodoxy ? Or is it possible that a 
man of open mind and many thoughts, when he came to the 
great deliverance, felt with so many of his countrymen that the 
cause lay not in man's valour alone, nor in the wisdom of 
Themistocles (whom Herodotus did not highly esteem), but 
beyond — flavit Deus et dissipati sunt ? ^ 

Then, again, practical questions arise. How far was it 
possible for a Greek to travel in the Persian Empire before 
the pacification of Callias in 448 B.C. ? ^ Egypt in rebellion 
from 460 to 454 — war in Cyprus again in 449, if it had ever 
left off for ten years — was it open to a Halicarnassian to go 
where an Athenian and an Ionian might not — for it seems 
trade between the interior and the coast cities was interrupted 
— ^when Halicarnassus was a part of the Athenian Empire, 
and the particular Halicarnassian an exile and an especially 
warm admirer of Athens and of Pericles ? ^ What welcome 
would have waited him in Tyre, the very centre of Persian 
naval activity against Greece and the fleets of Cimon? To 
Tyre, he says, he went from Egypt (ii. 44), and in Egypt it is 

^ Cf. Herodotus, viii. 13, eVoieerd re irav virb tov Oeov OKtos av i^KToaQelrj 
rw ''EXKrjviKW to UepcriKov fxrjde ttoXXw ttKcov c'ir). Also viii. IO9, Speech 
attributed to Themistocles, rdde yap ovk rjyi.eis Karepyaa-afxeBa dXXa Oeoi 
re KoL rjp(oes. Cf. Meyer, iii. § 210. Aeschylus and Herodotus show a 
feeling that the result of the war was a wonder. Compare what 
Herodotus says of the terror beforehand, vii. 138, ev deifxarL /xe-yaXw. 

2 On this question as to Herodotus being able to travel, see How 
and Wells on vii. 151. 

^ We know something of how Athens might treat enemies and enemy 
property, but next to nothing (if so much) about Persian practice. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD ii 

clear he was travelling a number of years after the battle 
of Papremis, which was fought in 460. He visited the battle- 
field and examined the skulls of the fallen — and " the skulls 
of the Persians are so weak that, if you hit them only with a 
pebble, you will make a hole in them, while those of the 
Egyptians are so exceedingly strong that you would hardly 
break them if you struck them with a large stone " (iii. 12). 
Herodotus believed that the difference between the skulls was 
explained by the Egyptian habit of shaving the head — the 
bone was hardened by exposure to the sun — and the Persian 
practice of wearing ''tiaras, that is, felt caps." Whatever the 
answer to the physiological problem — and it reveals something 
of the historian's many-sidedness — it looks as if the visit to 
the field of Papremis must have been quite a number of years 
after 460. It might have been possible after the destruction 
of the Athenian forces in Egj^t in 454, but it would have been 
safer after 448. 

Other travels have to be fitted in — Tyre after Egypt, 
with the suggestion that it may have been immediately — 
Babylonia too — for his language about the millet-fields implies 
a visit (i. 193 ; cf. i. 183) > A phrase (ii. 150) suggests that 
he visited Babylonia before Egypt. In addition there are 
travels in the North : in Thasos he saw the wonderful old 
Phoenician mines (vi. 47), Samothrace he visited perhaps 
(ii. 51), Thrace (vii. 115), the Black Sea (iv. 85), Colchis 
(ii. 104), and perhaps Macedon, where his hero, Alexander, 
died in 454.^ Sardis (i. 80-84) was nearer home, though here 
again war might hinder a visit, while Cyrene and North 
Africa, if he visited them, were in another direction. He says 
he was at Dodona (ii. 52) and at Zacynthos (iv. 195) ; and it is 
fairly clear that he must have lived for some time in Athens, 
and visited Sparta. 

The questions have been asked with what object Herodotus 
travelled,^ and how an exile paid his way upon so many journeys ; 

1 This is accepted by Busolt 2, ii. 606. 

^ Grundy, Persian War, p. 220 : Herodotus' description of the coast 
route impHes a journey through Macedonia to N. Greece ; p. 223, also 
in Thessaly the evidence of " autopsy " is overwhelming. 

^ For the objects of his travel, see How and W^ells, Intr. p. 17, where 
suggestions pointing to trade are set out. He probably did most of 
his journeys like a Greek, by sea. 



12 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

for Greek exiles generally were cut off from all their possessions 
— all that could be confiscated. It is suggested that his interest 
in trade points to the answer. He may, others suggest, have 
been a Logopoios ^ — a professional teller of tales. Certainly 
nobody tells them better. Witness the tale of how Croesus 
tried the oracles, how he sent messengers to every oracle in 
Greece and Libya to ** find out what knowledge they had," 
and how he charged each man of them that on the hundredth 
day after his departure he should ask the oracle, to which he 
was sent, what Croesus, the son of Alyattes, King of the 
Lydians, chanced to be doing on that day, and should write 
down the answer. This was done, and the messenger from 
Delphi brought back five strange hexameters, in which Croesus 
recognized — and there alone — that one god at least had seen 
him on that hundredth day, boiling pieces of a tortoise and of 
a lamb in a cauldron of bronze, with a cover of bronze over them 
(i. 47, 48). The story moves on its way till the strange message 
of Apollo comes, and Croesus examines all the rest, and then 
at last we are told what Croesus had in fact been doing. It 
looks as if Herodotus had tried his stories often by word of 
mouth before he wrote them down. Their management and 
the language imply the story told to listeners who watch the 
narrator — conversation sublimated. And it is clear that 
wherever he went, he drew stories from the men he met, and it 
is not to every one that men will tell stories. Whether money 
was given him or not, we cannot say, but we can believe that 
few men could have had so many friends about the Mediter- 
ranean, Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and Macedonian. 

Whatever the avowed objects of his journeys may have 
been, his purpose was travel, at his own easy pace, always at 
leisure for life. The Greeks of his day were interested in 
Geography ; Aeschylus cannot keep it out of his plays ; the 
map was one of the curiosities of the school of Socrates, 
Aristophanes would have us believe ; and Plutarch drew the 
Athenians in 416 before the Sicilian Expedition busy with the 
Geography of the West — *' young men in wrestling-grounds, 
and old men in shops and semicircles, sitting and sketching 
the lie of Sicily and the nature of the sea around it, and the 

^ As to the \oyoiroi6s, see Meyer, Forsch. ii. p. 238, and ref. 
to i. 193 ; iii. 80 ; vi. 43 ; Thuc. i. 20. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 13 

havens and the regions where the island is turned toward 
Libya." ^ Climates and products interested Herodotus, as 
we have seen, and animals, as we shall see. But, most of all, 
as with the other great traveller of Greece, " Many men's 
cities he saw and learned their mind." 

He did not learn their languages, as his great discovery 
about Persian names proves — a fact " which the Persians have 
themselves failed to notice, but I have not failed to do so ; 
their names are like their bodily shape and their magnificence, 
and they all end with the same letter, that letter which the 
Dorians call san and the lonians sigma " (i. 139). Xerxes 
seems to have spelled his name without a final " s" — in spite 
of Herodotus and the Book of Esther — Khsajarsa — simpler 
as the Greek form sounds to Western ears. Herodotus, of 
course, picked up words here and there — ^he tells us that the 
Persian name for petroleum was rhadinake (vi. 119), that they 
called a particular measure artahe (i. 192), and thirty furlongs 
a parasang (vi. 42) — ^just as when he deals with Egypt he tells 
us the Egyptian name for a crocodile champsai (ii. 69, repre- 
senting mshu)} But he evidently found Persian friends who 
could speak Greek, and as ever he listened with open ears and 
open heart. Some of these have been conjecturally identified 
by modern scholars as the satraps of Daskyleion, of the house 
of Artabazos,^ and Zopyrus, who was an exile in Athens at 
one time, the son of the Megabyzos who reconquered Eg57pt 
in 454 (iii. 160). 

It will not be expected that everything these friends told 
him would of necessity be indisputably accurate — they had 
their lapses of memory and temper, and no doubt were ignorant 
of much that modern archaeologists have since learnt. When 
they told him of the ancient history of Persia, they were as 
liable to error as any of his Spartan or Samian informants — 
liable to mass things into one place and one time, in accordance 
with that instinctive dramatic tendency which all men share — 
liable to drop insignificant names and to get significant ones 

1 Plut. Nicias, 12. Cf. Alcih. 17. 

2 Timseach to-day, according to Eliot Warburton, The Crescent and 
the Cross, ch. ix. p. 85, whose rights to freedom of speUing should be as 
free as those which Herodotus assumed, 

* See Chapter VII. p. 210. 



14 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

from the wrong, angle. And their guest recognized some of 
their limitations — they told him among them three several 
stories about the rise of Cyrus ; and he chooses that which the 
Persians '* who do not wish to glorify Cyrus " tell (i. 95). 
Later on he was certainly informed about Darius by Persians 
who did not wish to glorify him either. He hstened and 
noted and asked questions and wrote his history, and if he 
had made no slips of his own, he would have been less human 
than he is.^ One thing is remarked by Spiegel that, while 
the tale of Cyrus is not historical, it has yet historical traits 
and is of high value, for, among the fabulous stories told of 
Persia, there is none " so thoroughly Iranian " in its general 
character. 2 When in 1837 the rock-inscription of Behistun 
was deciphered by Henry Rawlinson, it came to light that 
Herodotus' account of the rise of Darius was very much that 
of the king himself .^ Of the seven conspirators, who slew the 
false Smerdis, or Bardiya, Herodotus names six aright. He 
had never seen the rock, and he could not have read the 
inscription if he had seen it. As Spiegel suggests, it speaks 
well for the accuracy of his authorities * — and it says something, 
too, for the guest who listened. 

What matters beside actual history he discussed with 
his Persian friends, it is not hard to trace. Politics for one 
thing occupied both him and them — politics and political 

^Grundy, Persian War, p. 340 : "Nature had not made him an 
arithmetician " ; p. 354, a mistake in addition in viii. 48 ; and an 
error of two days in journals of Thermopylae and Artemisium. Cf. 
How and Wells on vii. 187, a mistake in long division; and on i. 31, a 
mistake in intercalary months. Also note that two systems of chrono- 
logy appear to be loosely combined, or used as they occur. See How 
and Wells, App. xiv. The main point is that Herodotus " was not 
interested in chronological questions." 

2 Spiegel, Eranische Alterthumer, ii. 269 ; and F. Justi in Geiger 
und Kuhn, Grundriss der Iranischen PMlologie, ii. p. 426. 

3 How and Wells, App. v., point out some misconceptions. It was 
really a national movement led by the rightful heir of the Achaemenian 
house, not the work of a group of conspirators merely. The story 
about the horse is absurd ; it may be due to family of Otanes. How 
and Wells conclude that Herodotus was a faithful reporter of what he 
was told [so he says himself, vii. 152], but that his historical insight 
was lacking or irregular. 

* Spiegel, Eranisphe Alterthumer, ii. 310, 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 15 

theory — which form of government is best, as we have seen 
(iii. 80-82). Zopyrus and his house owed their troubles to 
their LiberaHsm and Philhellenism. The government of the 
Persian Empire and its organization by Darius clearly inter- 
ested Herodotus, for he gives a careful account of it (iii. 90-96 ),i 
and also of the Persian army (vii. 61-80), and the Royal Road 
from Sardis to Susa (v. 52-54), and the posts system, which 
*' they call angareion " (viii. 98). Of the great war their con- 
versation must have been endless, but this is not to deny that 
Herodotus may have had information in writing from his 
friends. 

Of Persian character it is clear that he thought highly. 
We have seen how he praised Persian valour at the battle of 
Plataea ; and elsewhere he says, *' Of all men whom I know 
the Persians are most wont to honour such as are valiant in 
war '* (vii. 238). Next after excellence in fight they honour 
the possession of many sons, and they educate their boys from 
five years old to twenty in three things only, to ride the horse, 
to shoot with the bow, and to tell the truth (i. 136). What 
they may not do, they may not speak of ; but the greatest 
disgrace of all with them is to lie, and, next after that, to be in 
debt, for they hold that a man in debt is bound to lie a little 
(i. 138). It is remarkable in this connexion to find the stress 
laid by Darius in the Behistun inscription on truth and false- 
hood — ** the people became wicked and the lie was great in 
the land,'* and so forth. ^ 

The fifth century B.C. was one in which speculation as 
to the gods occupied a large place in men's minds. Wherever 
he went, Herodotus had a curious and friendly eye for the 
beliefs of the foreigner, and Persian religion interested him. 
What he tells us belongs more properly to a later chapter. 
Meanwhile, it is recognized that there is a certain latent 
sympathy to be felt in his account of the Persian attitude to 
the gods — it is in a sense a criticism or a suggestion offered to 
Greece.3 But the way in which it is offered should be noted — 

1 On these matters, see Chapter VII. pp. 208 ft. 

* Some of this will be found again in Chapter VII., with other matter 
on Persia that we owe to Herodotus. 

^ Grundy {Persian War, p. 35) remarks that it is strange at first 
that Persian monotheism never captured the Greek imagination. The 



i6 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the Persian usage is mentioned incidentally in a general descrip- 
tion of Persian life. Something has impressed the writer, and 
he records his impression and offers it to his readers for their 
reflection, but neither by way of propaganda nor innuendo. 
The method is simpler — the simplest possible — and not less 
effective. Elsewhere the tone is rather different — "the 
Scythians make the rites of Bacchus a reproach against the 
Greeks, for they say it is not fitting to invent a god like this 
who drives men to frenzy " (iv. 79). But to Bacchic religion 
we may have to recur ; it was not of the first rank in the Greek 
world. For the moment, it may be observed that foreign 
travel has done for Herodotus something of what it did for 
Xenophanes — it has induced self-criticism and the doubt as 
to whether the last word is after all with the Greeks — perhaps 
even the first word was not. 

In many ways the Second Book is the most interesting part 
of Herodotus' history, for there he treats of Egypt. Egypt 
from the very beginning was a surprise and a paradox to the 
Greeks. It was to them what Japan in one way and Australia 
in another have been to Europeans — everything was the wrong 
way round. The fauna of Australia, with its kangaroo and 
ornithorhynchus types, is utterly unlike that of any other 
continent ; and in the same way Egypt surprised the Greeks. 
Greece proper has no navigable river ; Egypt is nothing else — 
a country eight hundred miles long, and twenty or thirty broad, 
with a delta. The delta, as Herodotus says, is " added land 
and the gift of the river '* (ii. 5), and a very " busy " river it 
is (ii. 11).^ Greek rivers often dry up altogether in summer, 
but " the Nile comes down increasing in volume from the 
summer solstice onwards for a hundred days, and then, when 
it has come near the number of these days, it turns and goes 
back, failing in its stream, so that it continues low all the winter 

Greeks came to admire Persian virtues, but never grasped their spiritual 
and intellectual basis. 

1 It is not the only one, for the Achelous " has already made half 
the Echinades from islands into mainland " (ii. 10). Cf. Mark Twain's 
account of Mississippi shifting and silting. Life on Mississippi, p. 4 : 
" Nearly the whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old 
Mississippi river which La Salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred 
years ago, is good, solid, dry ground now;" and ch. xvii. for further 
illustrations. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 17 

long until the summer solstice again " (ii. 19). No Egyptian 
could explain this to Herodotus, and he was not satisfied with 
the explanations of " certain Greeks who wished to be notable 
for their wisdom " (ii. 20). The Egyptian towns standing 
out of the water in flood-time recalled the Cyclades (ii. 97).^ 
The lizards of Greece are little creatures ; the same sort of 
thing in Egypt, " of all mortal things that we know, grows 
to the greatest bulk from the smallest beginnings ; for its eggs 
are not much larger than those of geese, and the young one is 
in proportion to the egg, but he keeps on growing till he is 
seventeen cubits long and even larger yet" (ii. 68). The 
hippopotamus again was almost as strange as the crocodile 
(ii. 71) ; and men told still stranger things about a holy bird 
called the phoenix, but Herodotus never saw it himself (ii. 73). 
Finally, like their climate and their river, which are quite 
unlike any others, the Egyptians have manners and customs 
in a way opposite to other men in almost all matters (ii. 35). 
Women go to market and men stay at home and weave, and 
they weave down where others weave up. Men carry loads 
on their heads ; women on their shoulders. They eat out 
of doors. No god or goddess has a priestess, nothing but 
men priests, who, unlike priests elsewhere, shave their heads 
instead of wearing long hair ; but they let it grow as a sign of 
mourning instead of cutting it. Men and beasts live together ; 
and men and women refuse to eat food made of wheat or barley. 
They knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands. 
They make fast the rings and ropes of boats inside the gunwale 
and not outside. Greeks write from left to right, but Egyptians 
write from right to left and have two scripts. Their religious 
rites are their own, though these have influenced the beliefs 
and rituals of Greece. They are divided into castes, and 
the priests have a very special position ; and (which is very 
strange) " no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a Greek on 

1 Cf . Eliot Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross, p. 2 1 , on the Nile 
in flood, " The stream . . . spreads abroad its beneficent deluge over 
the vast valley. Then it is that Egypt presents the most striking of its 
Protean aspects, becoming an archipelago studded with green islands, 
and bounded only by the chain of the Lybian Hills and the purple 
range of the Mokattam Mountains. Every island is crowned with a 
village or an antique temple, and shadowy with palm-trees or acacia 
groves. Every city becomes a Venice." 
2 



i8 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the mouth, nor use a Greek's knife, nor his spits, nor kettle, 
nor taste the flesh of a clean cow if cut with a Greek's knife " 
(ii. 41). 

Till the nineteenth century Herodotus was our oldest, 
fullest, and brightest source of knowledge about ancient 
Egj^t ; but, with the decipherment of the actual monuments 
of the Pharaohs and the growing accessibility of Egyptian 
documents, it is not surprising that EgjTptologists to-day 
know vastly more about Egypt's history than Herodotus was 
able to learn from what, rather ungratefully, one of them 
calls " the current gossip of the traders, guides, and priests 
whom he met there." Herodotus tangles the dynasties, he 
is ignorant *' even of the most important phases of the history," 
and he weaves into his narrative fairy tales of Rhampsinitus 
3,nd impossible legends of Sesostris ; he attributes Hittite 
monuments in Western Asia Minor to the Egyptian conqueror 
who never was there ; and, in addition to believing the tales 
of his informants, he is guilty of increasing the confusion by 
blunders of his own. On the other hand, Mr. Llewelyn Griffith, 
the author of these criticisms,^ admits that he gives fairly 
accurately the names and the succession of the builders of 
the three Great Pyramids, and shows '' a decided improve- 
ment " when he comes to the history of the last two centuries 
— the Saite and Persian kings. This praise is qualified by the 
complaint as to " the frequent absence of even superficial know- 
ledge " of the country ; "his few geographical remarks upon 
it seem only to show his complete ignorance of Egypt above 
Memphis," and his " picturesque touches are exceedingly few." 

One feels that the critic wishes the author to share his 
interests instead of illuminating his own. The fact is that the 
ancient writer and traveller neither notice nor record quite 
the things that moderns would wish or expect. Where we 
are careful, they are careless — about dates and distances and 
so forth. They look for other things and see them, and miss 
what we see at the first glance. Arguments have been framed 
about the dates of Herodotus' life from his failure to allude 
to the great Periclean buildings on the Acropolis. But he 
had no occasion to mention them.^ The temples which do 

1 In Authority and Archcsology, pp. 164 £E. 
* Meyer, Forsch. i. 1 5 5 w. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 19 

interest him are the big ones, at Samos and the Egyptian 
Thebes (iii. 60 ; ii. 143) ; and the AcropoHs buildings were 
not very large. After all, the great writers are great, not in 
virtue of the accuracy of their archaeology — even when they 
are historians — but in the measure in which they absorb the 
life of the world they live in — its moving ideas, interests, 
prejudices, hopes, fears, darkness, and light — and quicken 
these anew in the heart and mind of every sympathetic reader. 
A man will not do this, who is as foolish and incompetent as 
the Herodotus of some critics. It is worth noting that there 
are Egyptologists of competence who have another opinion 
of Herodotus. '* He observed," says Adolf Erman, " exactly 
those things which are of special interest to us." It may be 
that Erman refers in particular to his theme of Egyptian 
religion, but he calls Herodotus " an indefatigable and careful 
observer." ^ Finally, if what Herodotus tells us is not borne 
out by the ancient monuments, it is conceivable that what 
he tells us was of more moment in his day than what is actually 
to be learnt from those monuments; just as the fact that 
England in the seventeenth century believed Charles I wrote 
Eikon Basilike is of more historical significance than the 
other fact that he actually did not. Let us pass to what 
Herodotus saw and thought worth while to record. 

We have seen his comment on the *' busy " river ever at 
work giving land to the people, and on this strange people 
who do everything the wrong way round as the Japanese once 
did. Most of all their religious usages were peculiar. The 
worship of animals always struck the Greeks as in some way 
odd. " An Eg5^tian temple, outside all splendour, and inside 
a priest singing a hymn to a cat or a crocodile," is a phrase 
that occurs several times. ^ Why should the Egyptians be 
so fussy about cats and dogs ? *' In whatever houses a cat 
has died by a natural death," says Herodotus (ii. 66, 67), 
*' all those who dwell in this house shave their eyebrows only, 

1 Erman, Egyptian Religion (English translation), p. 175. Mr. 
Grundy — it is in another connexion, of course — emphasizes Herodotus' 
demonstrable care and the pains which he devoted to topography ; he 
is the best and most conscientious topographer in ancient history 
[Persian War, pp. 223, 559). 

2 Lucian, Imagines, 11; Celsus, ap. Orig. c. Cels. iii. 17; Clem. 
Alex. Paed. iii. 4. 2. 



20 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

but those in whose houses a dog has died shave the whole 
body and also the head. The cats, when they are dead, are 
carried away to sacred buildings in the city of Bubastis, 
where they are embalmed and buried ; but the dogs they 
bury each people in their own city in sacred tombs " ; and 
the mouse and the sparrowhawk, the ibis, and especially the 
bull, are similarly honoured, while the sacred cows are thrown 
into the Nile (ii. 41). Modern discoverers have found cemeteries 
where cats were laid by hundreds of thousands, vaults where 
crocodiles, their eggs and young were buried, and the graves 
of ibis, hawk, serpent, and fish. Indeed, the export of 
mummied cats to be used for manure has been a modern 
industry of Egypt. ^ Apis is a more familiar figure in story — 
his miraculous birth as the child of a flash of light, his special 
markings, the joy and festival that attend his discovery, his 
life and death in sanctity — and the madness of Cambyses who 
slew him wantonly and perished " wounded in the same part, 
where he had formerly struck Apis, the god of the Egyptians." ^ 

The festivals of the Egyptians are described by Herodotus 
vividly enough — the draping of Amun in the skin of the slain 
ram (ii. 42), the fight at the temple of " Ares " at Papremis 
(ii. 63), the illumination at Sais on one night of the year 
(ii. 62). He tells how seventy myriads of men and women 
gather at Bubastis every year, coming in boats from all parts, 
playing on flutes and castanets, singing and clapping their 
hands, and dancing, and how the women pilgrims taunt the 
women of every place the boats pass, and how '* more wine 
is consumed at this feast than in all the rest of the year." 
In some of these festivals foreigners join — the Carians dwelling 
in Eg5^t take more part in the mourning at Busiris than the 
Egyptians themselves " inasmuch as they cut their foreheads 
also with knives ; and by this it is manifested that they are 
strangers " (ii. 61) ; but, adds Herodotus, " for whom they 
mourn, it is not permitted to me by religion to say." 

In fact, Herodotus has been initiated into some of the 
mysteries here ^ as elsewhere — " whosoever has been initiated 
in the mysteries of the Kabeiroi, which the Samothracians 
perform, having received them from the Pelasgians, that 

1 Erman, Egyptian Religion, 177. ^ Herodotus, iii. 27-29, 64. 

3 So, too, ii. 171. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 21 

man knows the meaning of my speech " (ii. 51). Ov^ 
oatov — that is the check that seals his hps, evarofia Keia6(o 
(ii. 171). More emphasis has to be laid on this aspect of his 
character than is sometimes done. " If I should say for what 
reasons the sacred animals have been thus dedicated, I should 
fall into discourse of matters pertaining to the gods, of which 
I desire not to speak ; and what I have actually said, touch- 
ing slightly upon them, I said because I was constrained by 
necessity " (ii. 65). So says Herodotus, but in spite of it some 
critics are very apt to find in other passages a hint of irony 
which seems alien to his real interest in the divine. Thus, 
when he begins his story of Egypt (ii. 3), he says that he is 
not eager to tell in full the narratives he heard about the 
gods, but he will mention their names only, *' because I think 
that all men are equally informed about them " ; only where 
his story compels him will he mention them. "Icroi/ eVtWao-^afc 
is a remarkable phrase — does it mean " know as much " or 
'* know as little " as one another ? Before we quite make 
up our minds, let us compare another passage : " As to the 
form of the camel, I do not here describe it, since the Hellenes 
for whom I write know about it ; but what they do not know 
about it, I will tell " (iii. 103). There is no obvious call for 
irony about the camel ; is there about the Egyptian gods ? 

In this connexion it may be worth remembering that in 
1903, when Naukratis was excavated, the base of a vase was 
found in the remains of the Hellenion with the lettering 
H . . AOTOT — an inscription not hard to restore ; and the 
question suggests itself, did the historian dedicate it ? Many 
men called Herodotus are mentioned in inscriptions.^ Even 
if it was our Herodotus who dedicated the vase, conformity, 
as we all know very well, is not inconsistent with irony. So, 
when Herodotus, after some speculation about Herakles, ends 
with the words : " And now that we have said so much about 
all this, may the gods and the heroes be propitious " (ii. 45), 
it may be, as Prof. Bury has suggested, " a graceful genu- 

1 See index to Dittenberger's Sylloge, and compare the various 
people called Thucydides, Euripides, Xenophon, and the like, known 
to us in various ways — and the other William Shakespeares of Stratford 
and John Bunyans at and near Bedford, contemporaries of the great 
ones. 



22 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

flexion " merely and nothing more. It may be that his blend- 
ing of '* naivete and scepticism " is " very piquant " — that 
he strikes ** the characteristic note of Ionian scepticism" from 
the first, as Prof. Bury says — that " something closely akin 
to cynicism and flippancy is common enough in Herodotus," 
as Mr. Cornford says ^ — but surely such a spirit is that of a 
man who has made up his mind, who is done with religion 
and theology ; and that is assuredly not the position of 
Herodotus. His general outlook on life {Weltanschauung), 
as Eduard Meyer says,^ did not grow up on Ionian ground. A 
man may despise the lonians and be influenced by them, 
but in any case it may be remarked that more is said to-day 
about Miletus and the Milesian spirit than it is easy to find 
evidence for ; and Meyer is surely right in looking elsewhere 
for the spiritual analogues of Herodotus. Of irony he, like 
all large and various human spirits, is capable, but like such 
spirits he will not deal in it alone. When Prof. Bury says 
he is an " expert in not committing himself,'* that is surely 
nearer the mark, though the phrase is not quite happy. ^ 
There may be two reasons for a man not committing himself : 
he may not know and not care — or he may care a good deal 
and yet not know. 

When the great storm played havoc with the fleet of 
Xerxes, it lasted three days ; " but at last the Magians, 
making sacrifices and chanting aloud to the Wind, and sacrific- 
ing to Thetis also and the Nereids, stopped it on the fourth 
day — or else, perhaps, of its own will it slackened {eKoiraae) " * 
(vii. 191). It is the perennial problem of prayer that Herodotus 
raises. Again, is the gully of the Peneios the work of Poseidon, 
as the Thessalians say ? It was evident to Herodotus that 
it was the eflect of an earthquake ; but then Poseidon is the 

^ Since this was first written, I note that others refuse to recognize 
Herodotus' " flippant, Parisian, man-of-the-worldly tone." Cf. How 
and Wells on Herodotus, iv. 113. 

2 Forsch. ii. 264. 

3 Grundy comes much nearer the real thing in saying more quietly 
that " caution is a prominent characteristic of the man " {Persian 
War, p. 292). 

* Longinus, 43, i, notes the word as popular and undignified, 
aaefivov yap to Koitidg-ai IdiayriKov. It is used of the wind in St. Mark, 
iv. 39; vi. 51. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 23 

author of earthquakes, some say, and therefore of the effects 
of earthquakes (vii. 129). Is it divine interposition or natural 
cause ? 

Before we answer these questions, let us look at two others. 
John Evelyn wrote in his Diary, 12 December, 1680 : " We 
have had of late several comets, which though I believe appear 
from natural causes, and of themselves operate not, yet I can- 
not despise them. They may be warnings from God, as they 
commonly are forerunners of his animadversions." Evelyn 
was secretary of the Royal Society, and the contemporary of 
Halley and Newton. Again in our own day, when the con- 
versation turns on psychical phenomena, on phantasms of the 
dying, for instance, which way does the evidence turn the 
scale of belief — or does it still swing ? Thirty years ago it 
might not have been swinging. ^ Is a man ironical, flippant, 
or Milesian when it is clear that, though intensely interested 
in a matter, he cannot make up his mind and that he cannot 
keep off the subject — even if at times to another man, who is 
not interested in the question, for whom it is settled and 
done with, his language seems susceptible of an ironical inter- 
pretation ? ** It was all being done by the god, that the Persian 
navy might be equalized with the Greek one and not be many 
times larger," ^ gays Herodotus, when a second storm does 
still further damage to the Persians. Some people are a great 
deal too clever to understand simple and straightforward 
minds. It is part of Herodotus' greatness that he can be 
inconsistent, that he can see both sides of a matter and see 
them too well to decide quickly. Herodotus is ready to re- 
concile the two possibilities as to the cause of the Peneios 
gully — to discuss the origins of Herakles, god or hero, or 
perhaps both, one of each ; he is open to criticize myth or 
Orphic theology, to listen to everything philosophers and 
others of more flippant habit may have to say, as he is to be 
initiated into mysteries ; but when all is said and done, there 
are gods, and they do influence men's lives, and they do reveal 
their will and sometimes the future. Theory here or theory 

1 Mr. William de Morgan's phrase hits off exactly " the stage of 
provisional receptivity we now live in " {Alice-for-Short, ch. xlvi.). 

2 No criticism of this passage could be less intelligent than that of 
Dr. Macan, ad loc. 



24 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

there, there are the facts of history and of Hfe, perplexing 
enough to justify or even to explain — but facts they are, as 
far as he can see, or his friend Sophocles either, and to facts 
it is wiser to stick. " Against oracles I cannot make objec- 
tions that they are not true, for I do not desire to try to over- 
throw them when they speak clearly," and he gives an instance, 
and continues : ** looking to such things as this, and when 
Bakis speaks so clearly, I do not venture myself to make any 
objections about oracles, nor can I admit them from others " 
(viii. 77).i 

Whatever the order in which Herodotus wrote his books, 
whether he began with Xerxes and afterwards added Egypt, or 
wrote straight ahead, it is clear that he kept his work by him 
till it was done, and it is humanly probable that he read over 
what he had written — and he published it. The speculations 
which Egypt wakes in his mind are speculations — and facts 
are facts. The three books about Xerxes are full of the divine. 
A later age might read the story otherwise. The Corinthian 
in Thucydides may see facts, thanks to Herodotus, but judge 
them differently — *' the Mede came from the ends of the earth 
to the Peloponnese before the Spartans were quite ready \o 
meet him . . . and chiefly tripped over his own feet." ^ But 
the last three books of Herodotus are pervaded by the sense of 
Providence being at work in the deliverance of Greece, open- 
eyed as he is for Greek bravery and cunning — Providence, that 
governs the brute world too, for its preservation, giving the 
hare many children and the lioness one only (iii. io8). Neither 
gods nor Providence are shaken by a fair study of facts, even if 
the facts raise questions ; and facts and questions in plenty 
Egypt had for Herodotus. 

To begin, then, Egypt opened up for the Greeks a vista of 
the immense antiquity of the earth and of man, not unlike that 
which Geology revealed in the nineteenth century. The sug- 
gestion came in two ways. The Nile makes Egypt, as Hero- 

1 Grundy {Persian War, p. 232) suggests that Herodotus probably 
had revised versions of oracles given him at Delphi. The revision 
would, of course, greatly help belief in one not aware that the oracles 
had been revised. See also the remark of Grundy on the oracle in 
the tale of Thermopylae, p. 307 — which seems just, and, if just, it really 
disposes of Professor Bury's *' graceful genuflexion." 

2 Thuc. i. 69. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 25 

dotus saw ; and he conjectured that what is now Egypt might 
once have been a long narrow gulf, not unlike the Red Sea, but 
reaching northward to the Mediterranean, and might in ten or 
twenty thousand years have been filled by a river " so great and 
so busy " as the Nile. Geological indications lead him to hold 
that it was so — shells on the hills, salt on the surface of the 
land here and there, and above all the black and crumbling soil 
which ''is in truth the mud and silt brought down from 
Ethiopia by the river " (ii. 11, 12).^ The observation is sound, 
and the speculation implies some freedom of mind in dealing 
with great tracts of time. But Geology is one thing and History 
another. 

*' Formerly," says Herodotus, " when Hecataios the logo- 
poios was at Thebes and told his own pedigree, and connected 
his own family with a god in the sixteenth generation, the priests 
of Zeus did for him much the same as they did for me, though I 
told them no pedigree of mine." (The addition is delightful.) 
Each historian in his day was taken into the temple, " which is 
of great size," and there he was shown a number of colossal 
wooden statues, each the likeness of a priest set up by himself, 
when in his turn he succeeded his father — each therefore 
representing a generation. " And when Hecataios had told his 
pedigree and connected his family with a god in the sixteenth 
generation, they counted up the statues and anti-pedigreed 
against him, not receiving his story that a man was born of a 
god ; and they anti-pedigreed thus, saying that each colossus 
was a piromis, son of a piromis, until they showed him five and 
forty and three hundred colossi ; and neither with god nor with 
hero did they connect them. Piromis is in the Greek tongue 
a kalos Mgathos "j (ii. 143).^ There is irony in this passage, 
but it is directed against Hecataios and not his sixteenth 
ancestor. 

Herodotus gives it as his opinion that Hesiod and Homer 
lived four hundred years before him and not more ; *' and these 
are they who made a theogony for the Greeks, and gave the 
gods their titles, and distributed to them honours and arts, 
and set forth their forms ' ' (ii. 53) . Four hundred years is a much 

^ See notes of How and Wells, ad loc. 

* This phrase is so hard to translate that I leave it, and refer the 
reader to the treatment of it at the beginning of Chapter VI. 



26 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

shorter time than three hundred and forty-five generations. 
Elsewhere he tells us that " the names of nearly all the gods 
have come from Egypt to Greece," and adds : " that they come 
from the barbarians, I find on inquiry to be the fact, and I think 
they mostly came from Egypt " ; and we can see how he reached 
his view. Certain Egyptian gods were identified with certain 
Greek gods in accordance with the habit of men all over the 
ancient world who found their own gods in those of most peoples 
they met, renamed but identifiable. But in Egypt Herodotus 
was told that the natives had had the actual names of the 
Greek gods in their country for all time (though not of all the 
gods) ; since they were the first to use the names of the twelve 
gods (ii. 4). Since Egyptian religion, then, is so much older 
than Greek, Greece must be the borrower. Poseidon has another 
origin, for " no people, except the Libyans, has had the name of 
Poseidon from the first " ; and certain other gods' names w^ere 
learnt from the Pelasgians. This line of speculation was con- 
firmed by the priestesses of Dodona. Herodotus tells us how he 
learnt that originally the Pelasgians worshipped gods without 
names, " calling them gods [deov^) as having set all things in 
order {devra^)," and that then they learnt the names from 
Egypt, and in some uncertainty asked the oracle at Dodona 
whether they should use them, and the oracle bade do so. Thus 
late in time did Greece learn to call her gods by name. How 
the names came at last, he sets forth in the tale of the black 
doves that spoke with human voices — a poetic way, he suggests, 
of saying that the dark-skinned Egyptian priestesses spoke a 
barbarian tongue.^ 

Not only the names of the gods he attributes to Egypt, but 
the images and the solemn assemblies, the processions and 
approaches to temples, for these have been in Egypt from a 
very ancient time, while the Greeks only introduced them 
lately (ii. 4, 58). One sacred custom he traces to another source 
— " I think that in these regions [Libya] first arose the practice 
of crying aloud during the performance of sacred rites, for the 
Libyan women do this well " (iv. 187). One can imagine him 
listening to the noise — tolerable because it was associated with 
religious emotion and archaeological discovery. 

Two or three generations had passed since Xenophanes of 
* See Herodotus, ii. 50-57. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 27 

Colophon had told the Greeks that Hesiod and Homer attri- 
buted to the gods all that was shame and blame among man- 
kind, and had added the ironical suggestion that, if cows and 
horses could carve gods, those gods would not be anthropo- 
morphic. Aeschylus, whom Herodotus read^ and used and 
quoted by name, taught that the popular idea of divine envy is 
not true enough — divine judgments are just and inexorable ; 
not God's envy, but man's overweening is their cause. But 
Herodotus, to whom they would attribute Milesian irreverence, 
keeps to the old paths. " The deity (to Oelov)'' says Solon in 
his story, *' is altogether envious and apt to disturb our lot " 
(i. 32). *' To me," says King Amasis to Polycrates, " thy great 
good fortune is not pleasing, since I know that the deity (to Oelov) 
is envious" (iii. 40). "God," says Artabanus, '* is wont to 
cut down all that exceeds ... for he allows none to think 
great things save himself " (vii. 10). Xerxes is for Aeschylus 
a warning to men against the blindness of overweening ; in 
Herodotus' story he is driven into the folly of his great expedi- 
tion by divine compulsion that he may be brought low. So 
near does he keep to popular thinking, or popular fear ; slowly 
do the great ideas penetrate a people. 

A curious hint almost of antipathy comes out when he is 
ending the splendid but improbable tale of Rhampsinitus. 
The king, they told him in Egypt, went down alive to that 
place which the Greeks call Hades, and there he diced with 
Demeter and came back with a gift from her. Certain usages 
of his own day were supposed to commemorate this — " but 
whether it is from this cause that they keep the feast or for 
some other, I cannot say." And then, in the next chapter, he 
makes an apologia, and adds a most striking fact (which modern 
scholars hold to be in part wrong), and concludes with a dark 
touch at certain people. 

*' Now as to the tales told by the Egyptians let him accept 
them to whom they are credible. As for me, it is to be under- 
stood throughout the whole of the history that I write what I 
hear said by the people in each place. The Egyptians say that 
Demeter and Dionysos are rulers of the world below. And the 
Egyptians are also the first who spake this word that the soul 

* Herodotus did a good deal of reading — especially poets. See vi. 
52. Cf. iv. 36, his study of geography and maps. 



28 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

of man is immortal, and that, when the body dies, the soul ever 
enters into another creature that chances then to be coming to 
birth ; and when it has gone the round of all the creatures of 
land and sea and air, it enters again into a man's body then 
coming to birth ; and its circuit takes three thousand years. 
This word certain Greeks made use of, some earlier, some later, 
as if it were their own ; the names of these men I know, but I do 
not write them " (ii. 123). 

Now the god Dionysos and his name came to Greece long 
after the other gods (ii. 52) ; and the coincidence between his 
rites in Egypt and in Greece is not accidental ; the rites are 
not like other Greek rites, " nor certainly shall I say that the 
Egyptians took from the Greeks either this or any other custom,*' 
says Herodotus. He adds his belief that Melampus who intro- 
duced Dionysiac rites to Greece must have learnt them from 
Cadmus of Tyre, and so they came from Egypt (ii. 49). For 
in Egypt " the customs of their fathers they use, and they add 
no other thereto " (ii. 79). Accordingly when rite and god and 
linen garb coincide, and the Egyptians are in agreement with 
the observances " called Orphic and Bacchic, but really 
Egyptian, and with the Pythagoreans " (ii. 81), it is clear 
which borrowed from the other. 

The Egyptians indeed taught the immortality of the soul ; 
but as to its transmigration scholars are not agreed. Professor 
Burnet says categorically they did not ; ^ Professor Erman 
says we cannot judge whether Herodotus was rightly informed. ^ 
Herodotus, Professor Burnet says, does not refuse to give names 
except in the case of contemporaries ; so, as Pythagoras was 
dead, he accepts Stein's suggestion that Empedocles is meant, 
whom Herodotus might have met at Thurii. Southern Italy, 
as the Orphic gold tablets may remind us, was full of Orphic 
teaching. Whoever is meant, the phrase used implies dis- 
favour ; there is detachment in this reference to the Orphics— 
the first allusion to them in literature. 

First and last Herodotus attributes so much of Greek 
religion to Egyptian influence as to rouse still more the indigna- 
tion of Plutarch, who remarks that, while he witnesses to the 

* Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 95 n. Cf. Gomperz, Greek 
Thinkers, i. 126. 

* Erman, Egyptian Religion, 191. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 29 

great piety and justice of the Egyptians, he acquits Busiris of 
human sacrifice and the slaying of guests, and attaches these sins 
to Menelaus — a Greek, of course ; " such a lover of barbarians 
is he." ^ It is possible to sympathize with Plutarch's wrath, 
for scholarship has other canons than those used by Herodotus 
to explain similarity of custom and belief, and the indebtedness 
of Greece to Egypt in this field is given up nowadays. But 
for our present purposes it does not so much matter that 
Herodotus was perhaps wrong in his conclusions as that he 
thought deeply over certain questions, and that he gave his 
mind at once to the quest for evidence upon them, and to the 
study of such evidence as he found — and this in so frank and 
whole-hearted a way. It is also particularly interesting that, 
after initiation in several varieties of Mysteries, he cares so 
little for Orphism. Euripides disliked the Orphics ; Plato 
borrowed from them, and detested them — the one counting 
their rites quackery, the other indignant at the strong emphasis 
they laid on the wrong features of religion. The reasons of 
Herodotus are not so clearly given — unless it is that a strong, 
simple, truth-loving nature revolts at a divine revelation 
which turns out to be a mere plagiarism from Egypt. The 
soul may indeed be immortal ; but a religious confraternity 
that trades in this immortality, as if the teaching were their 
own — *' the names of these men I know, but I do not write 
them." 

Herodotus is not in the least ashamed of the fact that 
Greece has borrowed her arts from the barbarians. It was 
Cadmus and his Phoenicians who brought letter3 to the Greeks 
among " many arts," as old inscriptions testify which Herodotus 
saw at Thebes in Boeotia. Only, as so often happened, the 
Greeks *' having received letters by instruction of the 
Phoenicians, changed their form slightly and so made use of 
them " (v. 58-60). Whether we owe more to Cadmus and his 
friends for the consonants or to their Greek neighbours and 
successors for the vowels, only those perhaps who have tried to 
learn Semitic languages are quite qualified to say. The art of 
geometry, Herodotus says, was derived from Egyptian experi- 
ments in land measurement for purposes of taxation, *' and 
afterwards came into Hellas also." (Plutarch attributed the 
^ De Herodoti malignitate, 12, 13, p. 857A-D. 



30 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

stimulus to geometry to an ingenious command given by 
Apollo.^) " As touching the sun-dial and the gnomon," Hero- 
dotus continues, ** and the twelve divisions of the day, they were 
learnt by the Hellenes from the Babylonians " (ii. 109). Pro- 
fessor Sayce will not allow this about geometry — " only a Greek 
guide could have invented this story " — but he concedes the 
twelve hours to the Babylonians — " this is perfectly correct.'* 
It would be hard to deny it as long as every hour has sixty 
minutes. But the Greeks might even now go further and 
borrow still more, Herodotus holds — " As to human matters, 
the priests agreed with one another in saying that the Egyptians 
were the first of all men on earth to find out the course of the 
year, and to divide the seasons into twelve parts to make up 
the whole ; and this they said they found out from the stars. 
And they reckon this so much more wisely than the Greeks in 
my thinking, in that the Greeks every other year throw in an 
intercalated month to bring the seasons right, but the Egyptians 
reckon the twelve months at thirty days each, and bring 
in, every year, five days outside the number, and thus the 
circle of their seasons comes round to the same point in its 
course" (ii. 4) .2 What Greece owes to the Carians, we have 
seen. 

In short Herodotus sees that every race has, as we put it 
to-day, its contribution. His language is simpler, and till we 
grasp the strong, clear wisdom that underlies it we shall under- 
value him. " Every way then," he says, "it is plain to me 
that Cambyses was mad exceedingly ; for he would not have 
taken in hand to deride sacred usages and customs. For if one 
were to set before all men a choice and bid them pick out 
the best customs [vofiovsi) from among all customs, each race 
after examination would choose their own ; so much the best 
do all count their own customs. So that it is not likely that 
any but a madman would make laughter of such things " (iii. 38) . 
He fortifies his conclusion with the tale of how King Darius 
contrasted the usage of Greek and Indian in the disposal 

1 To double the size of the temple. 

2 Cf. Solon's reckoning of the days of a man's life, complicated by 
thirty-five intercalary months in seventy years, i. 32. See the inter- 
esting note of How and Wells on ii. 4 — on calendars. See also Chapter 
VII. p. 223. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 31 

of the dead, and ends, " I think Pindar was right when he 
said in his poetry that Custom is king of all " (v6/jlov irdvTmv 
jSaa-tXia)} 

The world is so wide and so various, so full of wonder, that 
there is room for all men to learn something of it for themselves 
and to tell it to others. There are the strange regions that 
lie outside the map, and some people finish their maps off too 
quickly and too ingeniously. It is curious, for instance, that about 
the Hyperboreans, the people at the back of the North Wind, 
more is known on the island of Delos than anywhere else — the 
Scythians, who ought to know of them, do not. " If, however, 
there are any H37perboreans, it follows that there are others 
who are Hypernotians.^ But I laugh when I see that many 
have drawn maps (irepLoBovf;) of the world already, and not 
one of them has set it forth in a sensible way ^ — seeing they 
draw Oceanus flowing round the earth, which they make as 
round as if they had used compasses [or a lathe, o)? airo Topvov], 
and make Asia and Europe equal in size " (iv. 36). Things are 
not as neat as that, and rumour reaches far into the unknown. 
There is the tale (iv. 42) of the circumnavigation of Africa by 
Phoenicians, from the Red Sea southward, and the thing '* which 
I cannot believe, but another may, that in sailing round Libya 
they had the sun on their right hand." He cannot believe 
that ; but he does believe that the sun is hottest for the Indians 
at dawn, and not, as for other men, at midday (iii. 104). He 
fetches the Danube from the Celts and the Pyrenees — " the 
city of Pyrene " — to the Black Sea, "cutting Europe across 
the middle," to the exclusion of the Rhone, of which we should 
have expected him to have heard more — from some Massilian or 
almost any trader with Marseilles (ii. 33). Polar nights he 
has heard of, but not in a convincing way — '* that beyond these 
are other men who sleep for six months — that I do not accept 
at all " (iv. 36) — " nor do I know of islands, called Cassiterides, 
really existing, from which the tin comes to us," nor of a river 

1 Pindar, Frag. 149 ; quoted also by Plato, Gorg. 484B, with more 
context. Herodotus gives the phrase another sense than that intended 
by the poet — " nearly the reverse," says W. H. Thompson. 

^ An argument oddly linked to a protest against a too symmetrical 
map ; Eratosthenes called it absurd, there might quite well chance to 
be Hypernotians (Strabo, 61, 62). 

^ We may note how this implies a study of books and maps. 



32 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Eridanos, though tin and amber do come from the end of 
Europe (iii. 115). *' As for him who talked about Oceanus, he 
carried his tale into the unknown, and needs not refutation ; 
for I for my part know of no river Oceanus existing, but I think 
Homer or one of the poets before him invented the word and 
brought it into poetry " (ii. 23). After all this, we are re- 
minded of gold-digging ants (iii. 102) and one-eyed Arimaspians 
(iii. 116) and many things improbable to us, but accepted by 
our historian.^ 

So he goes, wavering as every explorer must who has 
once crossed the line of the familiar and lived among the 
marvels of the unknown world. He loses the common canons 
of knowledge and probability that every common man in the 
streets of Halicarnassus can use, who is clever enough not to 
believe what surprises him. But there is a folly which does not 
believe what it is told. Even the floundering of Herodotus in 
and out of probability and impossibility, hearsay and sight of 
the eyes, speaks to his being no common man. He has grasped 
the wonder of the world — and his discovery is one of his great 
gifts to Greece and to mankind. 

Much is there passing strange, 

Nothing surpassing mankind. 
He it is loves to range 
Over the Ocean hoar 
Thorough the surges' roar, 

South winds raging behind. 

So sang his friend Sophocles, and none believed more heartily 
than Herodotus that there is naught more wonderful than 
man, with his victories over sea and earth and sky, the marvels 
of all the ends of the earth made his, the sea his bond of union 
with all men, and the very stars linked to the plough of the 
farmer and the helm of the steersman. " And speech and 
windswift thought and all the moods that mould a state hath 

1 At the same time, it is remarked that he is less credulous than 
Ctesias, and I am told that gold-digging ants are mentioned in Sanskrit 
literature — not that this proves them to exist, but it points to a wide- 
spread myth at all events, and some contact of Herodotus with people 
directly or indirectly in touch with Indian story. See H. G. Rawlinson, 
Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest 
Times to the Fall of Rome, who notes the soundness of some of the 
historian's information. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 33 

he taught himself/' And no phase of it all is alien to the 
interest of the great traveller. 

So far hardly a word has been given to the great history, 
so much we have found to absorb us in its writer. All we 
have dealt with so far, and much more, comes incidentally in 
the narrative of the Persian wars with the Greeks — *' for my 
tale sought digressions from the beginning of it," he says 
(iv. 30). Such a principle might make any book diffuse, 
but the art of Herodotus is seen in the way in which his tale 
carries all its digressions, all its weight of learning and wonder, 
the lore and legend of all mankind, and never loses sight of its 
goal. Each digression brings us nearer to that. And as we 
work deeper and deeper into the story, and hear less of 
Egyptians and Libyans in the plural, and more of this man and 
that man, we wonder more at the simple skill of the story- 
teller — *' most Homeric of them all," asLonginus said long ago.^ 
No one overshadows or warps the tale of the Great Persian 
War, but as Aristotle said of Homer, " with the minimum of 
prelude," Herodotus ** at once brings in a man or woman or other 
being, none characterless, each with a character of its own."^ 

One instance may suffice, and we will not take any of the 
great outstanding figures of the story — the wise Solon, or the 
cunning Themistocles, or any of the gallant Persians — but 
rather a figure from the background, whose history is suggested 
rather than told. Of the reign of Pisistratus we read in the 
First Book ; and in the Fifth we read how his sons were expelled 
— Thucydides found something to correct here — and how Athens 
grew great in freedom we have seen.^ And the Spartans 
saw it, too, and with regret ; and they were confirmed in their 
regret by a strange discovery, made since they expelled the 
Pisistratids. For " Cleomenes had obtained from the Acro- 
polis those oracles which the sons of Pisistratus possessed 
before, and had left in the temple when they were driven out " 
(v. 90) ; we remember they had to go quickly. In these 
oracles the Spartans learnt that they were destined to suffer 
many injuries from the Athenians ; so to reduce the strength 
of Athens they resolved to restore Hippias, and sent for him 
from Sigeum, where his family lived in exile, though in a town 
of their own. But when their allies gathered, the Corinthians 

1 Longinus, 13, 3. ' Poetics, 24, 7. * v. 78. 

3 



34 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

told the story of Cypselos, to dissuade the restoration. " And 
Hippias made answer, calling to witness the same gods, that 
assuredly the Corinthians most of all men would long for 
the Pisistratids, when the days come w^hen, it is fated, they 
shall be troubled by the Athenians. Thus Hippias made 
answer, as he that most exactly of all men knew the oracles '* 
(v. 93), He spoke in vain. But after twenty years of exile 
he came again to Attica, an old man, when the Persian expedi- 
tion reached Marathon,^ and once more he had to go away. 
And then he — or his — went to Xerxes, and with them an 
old enemy, now reconciled, Onomacritos, whom Hipparchos 
had driven from Athens, when Lasos, the poet, of Hermione, 
" caught him interpolating an oracle in the works of Musaeus " 
(vii. 6). What do these references to oracles mean ? 

Herodotus, as we have seen, believed in oracles, though 
some might be forged or false ; ^ but here was the man who 
knew the oracles best and most surely of all men. Why ? 
Look at his story. An old man in the year of Marathon, 
490, he must have been a child in those brilliant days when his 
great genial father was tyrant and exile by turns, when the 
men of Athens were glad to get him out and then content to 
have him back. Pisistratus was a man — a large-hearted, 
big-natured man ; if he was a tyrant, he was a tyrant with 
good-humour and friendly ways, who certainly would face 
the ups and downs of life with gaiety and spirit. But life 
was another thing for the t3n:ant's child — the sudden alarm 
in the night, the hushed flight through the darkness, the terror 
of sudden death by Athenian hands before dawn, the side-track 
down to the beach, the ship and its muffled oars, pursued still 
by the dread of capture — and then the restless years of exile — 
enlivened for the father by Thracian adventures among semi- 
savages and gold mines, and filled with haunting memories 
for the child, the women's tales of the night of fear told again 
and again, till every night was liable to be one of fear. Then 
the return — and Megacles' daughter — and the second exile ; 
again a return, with mercenary troops this time.^ And then 

» Herodotus, vi. 107, telling of his dream ; Thuc. vi. 59. 
2Cf.i. 66, 75 ; V. 91. 

3 This time, Herodotus tells us (i. 61), Hippias urged his father 
to recover his tyranny. 



THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD 35 

the bright old man died, and the nervous Hippias with his 
brothers succeeded, and still the dread of exile never died.^ 
What had the gods in store ? He turned to the oracles, 
gathered them, and studied them ; none knew them better, 
none took more care that no other should know them. For 
in modern China, as in Chrysostom's days, it is the experience 
of despots that it is better that they alone should have early 
knowledge of heaven's will — it leads eager men to rebellion, and 
cautious men to expect rebellion to succeed — difficulty and 
danger both ways for the monarch.^ Then the rebeUion comes, 
and Hippias loses his nerve ; he tries to smuggle his children 
out, but they are caught by the Athenians — and if he will not 
go, his children will be killed. He, too, is a man ; he agrees 
and goes ; and in the hurry he leaves his hoard of oracles 
behind. That is Herodotus* story, and he hardly pauses to 
tell it ; he only indicates it, and the reader may find it or 
let it go as he may. For, as Dry den said of Chaucer, '' Here 
is God's plenty." 

If the history of a war be one of strategies, tactics, and 
battles, then certain defects will be felt in Herodotus. He 
sketches his battles lightly — even such great ones as Salamis ; 
he is not very clear about such things as the movements of 
the Persian fleet and army about Artemisium. Often his 
accounts of political motives and actions seem defective to a 
modern student of politics who compares him with surprise 
with such experts as his contemporaries Aristophanes and 
Thucydides. He troubled very little about exact chronology, 
about which Thucydides troubled a very great deal. These 
may seem heavy deductions, and they would be in the case 

^ Thucydides, however, says that he too was (virpoa-odos. 

* Years before the Manchu dynasty fell, I was told by a missionary 
of prophecy-books that foretold the fall, and pointed to the symbol of 
the button on the official cap — like the seed vessel of the opium poppy, 
and like it to be crushed. To be found with such a book in one's 
possession was death ; but, said my friend, many Chinese, when you get 
to be on intimate terms with them, will own that they have seen them. 
See W. R. W. Stephens' Life of St. Chvysostom, pp. 57, 58, on the magic 
book that Chrysostom, as a student, fished out of the river Orontes, 
and the real danger it involved, when it was found that a soldier had 
seen what was done. The book was put back into the river. Cf. 
Ammianus Marcellinus, xxix. i, on the disastrous discovery in 371 a.d. 
that the next Emperor's name began with the letters eEOA. 



36 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

of many historians. But war and politics are more than 
manoeuvres — men and people are involved with all the varieties 
of mind and temperament that individuals and communities 
can show. If these matter, then few can equal Herodotus 
for the unsuspected and easy mastery with which in one way 
and another he brings before us the world in which the great 
conflict was fought out, what manner of men took part on 
either side, what were their ways of life, their preconceptions, 
and outlooks — everything, in short, that most matters in story 
or history. He rambles, he digresses, he looks as if he might 
be wasting time — but he never does. Men, who have missed 
his method or lacked the heart to catch his bright interest 
in life, may complain of him, but let them try to name any 
writer who tells anything like so much in such a compass — 
even if we are looking for mere historical material in the 
most matter-of-fact way. But history is more than historical 
material — it is life, and living men make it as they think and 
act, as they argue astray and go right by instinct, as they love 
and hate — sentient creatures not to be interpreted save by 
the loving imagination that cares too much for them to wish 
to tamper with the facts, and feels too keenly for them to 
be able to leave facts dead. All stirs in Herodotus — his web 
is woven of life, all of it is living ; and one might also say 
it is all the life there was in his day. A man's work may 
touch life in snatches ; this book touches it all the time ; and 
as the life of any period is one in itself, wide and deep as 
its roots strike and spread in the generations before it, so 
the work of Herodotus is one — its roots deep in the past, and 
still part of the glorious whole — one with the integrity of the 
world it represents. '' Many are the wondrous things, and none 
more wondrous than man,'* and in man himself there are few 
things so wonderful as the genius that from stray impressions, 
broken knowledge, and thoughts that are many and wander 
and come again, can create a world for the lasting happiness 
of mankind. And this Herodotus has done. 



CHAPTER II 
THE AGE OF PERICLES 

IN the history of the world and in the history of nations 
there are days that stand out as marking beyond all 
chance of error the passing away of one age and the 
beginning of another. What is it that makes the difference ? 
The men of the day before are still there ; the forces that 
shaped thought and action were working before and are 
working still ; but the men are new men, and thought works in 
a new way. A line has been crossed in experience and a new 
consciousness has been reached ; and as it happens with men, 
so it falls with nations — there is no return to the past. The 
new knowledge, the new realization of what the world can be 
and of what indeed it is, has changed everything. The man 
and the nation wake up to a new universe, a new creation ; 
the old landmarks are gone ; everything has to be thought out 
anew, to be rediscovered. The past is outworn and is dis- 
carded ; the future — no, the very present is all to learn ; and 
in joy and in perplexity they go forward — 

Moving about in worlds not realized. 

Such a new dawn broke for Greece, when the day of Salamis 

was over. There were battles yet to be fought with the Persian, 

but they would be fought in a new spirit on land and sea — in 

the spirit of victory. It was not contempt for the foe, for the 

Persian was a fighting man, whose courage and spirit the 

historian says were a match for the Spartans themselves. ^ But 

the knowledge, the conviction, that they were to outfight such 

an enemy was part of the new outlook of Greece. And when 

the Persian was finally driven back, there was a new world to 

organize and to rule. The islands and the cities of Asia were 

free, but far away in Asia lay the strength of the great antagonist 

1 Herodotus, ix. 62. 
37 



38 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

yet unbroken, and he might return. The bright variety of the 
old Greek days of the sixth century before Christ was gone ; ^ 
it was clear that, if the Persian was not to come again, some 
barrier must be set up to keep him back. The old happy-go- 
lucky sovereignties and independencies of city tyrants and 
island republics had meant the steady progress of Persian 
power ; the new age must strike out some new method of 
giving effect to what in the hour of danger all men had felt — 
the unity of Greece ; " there is the bond of Hellenic race, one 
blood, one tongue, the common temples of the gods, the common 
sacrifices, the manners of life which are the same for all." ^ 
The new era must give some new expression to this new and 
in tenser realization of old knowledge. There are new seas to 
sail, new lands to reconnoitre, for it is one thing to travel a 
country or to see a house as a stranger on sufferance, and to 
enter upon them an heir and a master. What changes will 
not sheer mastery of the sea bring with it ? Every thought of 
man and nation is crossed and quickened by a new sense of 
power. 

It is informing to look for a moment at a parallel, when a 
parallel is to be found. Let it be Elizabethan England, for 
there at least a great literature comes into being when a nation 
gains a new sense of power, and it is curious to see how close 
the parallel is. The Elizabethan, like the Greek, looked out on 
a world larger and more full of wonder than any of the genera- 
tions before him could have guessed. What the discovery of 
America meant to sentient and reflective natures can be read in 
the Faerie Queene, in Montaigne's Essays — a new door thrown 
open, through which the human mind will move to new thoughts. 
It is a new sense of power over the world itself, and with 
it comes a new grasp of the very heavens. Copernicus and 
Galileo made a new heaven for the new earth of Columbus 
and Cabot ; and what that meant we can read in Milton. 
The victory over the Armada gave the Englishman the ex- 
hilaration of this sense of power in the sphere of the nation. 
And in the sphere of thought we meet it again in Renaissance 

^ It is remarkable how many poets and thinkers and personaUties 
come from the islands in the old days, and how the islands are all over- 
shadowed afterwards. 

* Herodotus, viii. 144. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 39 

and Reformation. What is impossible, when God, making a 
new universe, reveals His plans " first as His manner is to His 
Englishmen " ? So Milton speaks of it. Power and the sense 
of power pervade the whole life of the country, and that life 
has for the time a unity — an *' integrity," it has been called — 
that makes men men indeed — not specialists who can do one 
thing and do it in a crippled because a one-sided way — but men 
who can enter into the whole life of man — who can sail a ship, 
can write a poem, can refute a Papist, can plant a new land and 
conquer an old enemy, live or die with that intense happiness, 
which belief in this glorious universe and the God who made it 
alone can give. 

Let us turn back to Greece now and follow out the parallel, 
beginning with the sense of power that came to the Greek when 
he looked out on the physical universe. It has been remarked 
that the Greek nautical terminology is native born, and it 
implies that the Greek found his way to the sea himself, and 
taught himself to build his ship and to sail it. What an 
immense feat this was, it is not easy to realize in an age of 
Mauretanias. No compass, no chart, no anchor even — yet 
the Greek mariner crept from land to land and got the sea 
by heart. He knew every country '' in profile " as it has been 
called, and he learnt every colour and every ripple the sea can 
have and the meaning of them — the shallow, the rock, the 
current. " Wise shipmasters," says Pindar, " can tell of a 
wind that shall come on the third day, and are not wrecked 
for love of gain." ^ Such knowledge is one of the real triumphs 
of the human mind. 

The Greeks found their way to Egypt early, as we know 
from the Odyssey, and at the beginning of the classical period 
when history begins to have documents, one of the most inter- 
esting of these is the inscription at the great rock-hewn temple 
of Abu-simbel in Nubia, made by Greek mercenaries in the 
service of King Psammetichos. The temple had been built 
by Rameses II in 1330 B.C., and now between 594 and 589 
the Greek soldiers cut their names in the legs of the colossi — 
one of them adding the name of his city. Colophon. ^ About 
the same time another Ionian found his way from Mitylene 
to Babylon and served in the army, apparently, of King 
^ Nemeans, 7, 17. ^ Hicks and Hill, Greek Hist. Inscr., No. 3. 



40 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Nebuchadnezzar (605-562 B.C.). His name was Antimenidas ; 
and when he came home in glory, his brother, the poet Alcaeus, 
wrote him an ode of which a few Hnes survive : 

Thou hast come from the ends of the earth ; 

And the hilt of the sword thou dost hold 
Is of ivory wrought, a thing of worth, 

Bbund and studded with gold — 
Of thy prowess the splendid mead — 

For in Babylon's ranks afar, 

Thou didst mightily aid in war. 
And didst work a valiant deed, 

Slaying a monstrous man. 
And dread was the terror he cast — 
Five royal cubits he towered vast 

Lacking only a span.^ 

Yet another contemporary lives in story for a strange 
adventure westward. " The Carthaginians," we read, '* if any 
sailed past them for Sardinia or the Pillars, used to drown him 
in the sea " — perhaps ship and all — '' and for this cause most of 
the tales of the West were not believed." ^ But about 600 B.C. a 
Samian sea-captain, sailing for Egypt, was blown out of his 
reckoning, " and, as the wind did not cease to blow, passed 
through the Pillars of Herakles and came to Tartessos (Tarshish), 
aided by divine providence." So Herodotus tells the tale of 
Kolaios, and leaves us to imagine the sudden gust of realization 
with which the Samian saw and knew the great rocks of Gibraltar 
and Jebel Musa, and how he found by sheer cunning and intre- 
pidity his way home, coasting along unknown shores, Africa or 
Spain, either passing by Carthage to Southern Sicily, or risking 
all at Scylla and Charybdis. But home he reached, and he 
brought, the historian tells us, more profit from his cargo than 
any Greek of whom we have certain knowledge, save one, of 
whom, alas ! modems know nothing.^ 

Not one of the stories is an empty tale of mere adventure. 
Each symbolizes the conquest of the world by the Greek mind. 
It was profit in money that men sought, and they found it ; 
but, like Saul seeking his father's asses, they found far more 
than they sought, for in a sense they found the Greece we know, 

^ Cf. Strabo, c. 617 ; the lines restored by Bergk. 

2 Strabo, 802, citing Eratosthenes the geographer. 

3 Herodotus, iv. 152. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 41 

or made it. Everywhere they watched and wondered and 
learnt, and the tales they brought home worked like leaven, 
and the Greek mind grew and expanded to absorb the whole 
world ^ — yes, and the stars above it, that brought the mariner 
back to his island haven. 

In the sphere of the nation, the sense of power that came 
from this conquest of all the world and its thoughts, received a 
new heightening and a new value, when the Persian was driven 
back. The Greeks, when they gave their mind to it, were now 
the first race on earth. 

In the sphere of the mind it was the same. Philosophy, 
Plato says, is the child of Wonder.^ As Greece more and more 
enters into her inheritance of the world, she realizes more and 
more the mystery of it all ; and the great questions rise of 
Whence, and Whither, of the One and the Many, of God and man, 
of being and becoming. The history of Greek philosophy is 
not our present concern, but let a few great names recall the 
great progression. There is Thales of Miletus, the first man of 
science and the first philosopher of the Western world ^ — the 
first Greek who foretold an eclipse (28 May, 585 B.C.),* and 
the first Greek, men said, who made a '* corner " ^ — ** the great- 
ness of Thales consisted in this, that he was the first to ask, not 
what was the original thing, but what is the primary thing now ; 
or more simply still, ' What is the world made of ? ' The 
answer he gave to this question was : Water." ® There is 
Anaximander, who is credited with making the first map, and 
who taught that behind the elements is one eternal indestructible 
substance, out of which everything arises, and to which every- 
thing returns. There is Heraclitus, greater than any before him 
or most after him — '' unquestionably the most remarkable 
figure among the Greek philosophical thinkers until we come to 
Socrates" ' — '*the parts I understood of his book," said Socrates, 
" were splendid ; and I suppose what I failed to understand was 
splendid too ; only it would need a Delian diver to get to the 

1 Compare the interesting phrase of Lucan describing Caesar dis- 
cussing the Nile at Cleopatra's table — quis digniov autem hoc fuit 
auditor mundique capacior hospes? (x. 182, 183). 

^ Theaetetus, 155D. 3 Bury, Greek History, p. 222. 

* Herodotus, i. 74. ^ Aristotle, Pol. i. 1 1, p. 1259 a, b. 

« Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy ^, p. 48. 

' Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, 212. 



42 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

bottom of it." ^ And there is Xenophanes, traveller and thinker, 
who studied the fossil shells in the Sicilian hills and the gods of 
Libya, and traced his country's decline to wrong thinking. 
" If horses and cows could carve gods," in what shape would 
they make them ? 

When we come to European Greece we find the leaders of 
thought are more clearly poets than philosophers, yet they too 
are touched by the new thoughts of the day. Pindar speaks of 
God at times in a strain that suggests monotheism — in language 
that fires the imagination : " God accomplish eth every end 
whereon he thinketh — God who overtakes the eagle on the wing 
and passes the dolphin in the sea, who bendeth the high- 
minded in his pride, and to others he giveth deathless glory." ^ 
Of course he is no monotheist, but certain old stories of the 
gods, he sees, cannot be true : " Meet is it for a man that con- 
cerning gods he speak what is noble ; so the blame is less. . . . 
For me it is impossible to call one of the blessed gods cannibal ; 
I stand aloof ; in telling ill tales is oft-times little gain." ^ But 
there were stories in which he saw little shame, thinking far 
otherwise than Euripides. Plutarch keeps four lines of his, 
where he speaks of the soul : * " The body of all men is sub- 
ject to all-powerful death, but alive there yet remains an image 
of the living man, for that alone is from the gods. It sleeps 
when the limbs are active, but to them that sleep in many a 
dream it revealeth an award of joy or sorrow drawing near." 
But there is a side to Pindar that is alien to the higher mind of 
Greece. ** We do not praise the Thebans in the Persian War," 
writes Polybius,^ " nor yet Pindar who in his poems told 
them to keep neutrality — 

The general weal of the townsfolk set in peace, 

Let them seek the gladsome light 

Of valour that gleameth bright 
When the troubles of the nation find surcease. 

" Large dreamy lines " ® — what do they mean ? what can 
they mean ? And at the end of the last poem which we can 

^ Diogenes Laertius, ii. 22. ^ pindar, Pythian, 2, 50. 

3 Pindar, Olympian, i, 35. 

* Consol. ad ApolL 35. See Adam, Vitality of Platonism, Essay II., 
on the doctrine of the divine origin of the soul from Pindar to Plato. 
^ Polybius, iv. 31. ® Professor Murray's description of them. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 43 

date — ** Things of a day ! what are we, and what not ? A 
dream of a shadow is man ; yet when some God-given splendour 
falls, a glory of light comes over him and his life is sweet." 
Good luck, high birth, valour, beauty, and compromise — it is 
not quite the sense of power. 

It is otherwise with his contemporary Aeschylus. A 
quatrain survives, said to have been written by himself for his 
own grave in Sicily : 

Here Aeschylus lies in Gela's land of corn, 

Euphorion's son, in far-off Athens born ; 

That he was valiant Marathon could show. 

And long-haired Medes could tell it, for they know. 

Would any but himself have thought of leaving out all 
mention of his poetry ? — and he did not think of it — did it 
without thinking, instinctively ; for what was his poetry ? 
** Looking steadfastly into the silent continents of Death and 
Eternity," wrote Carlyle of Sterling, " a brave man's judgments 
about his own sorry work in the field of Time are not apt to 
be too lenient." Critics have felt that even the poetry of 
Aeschylus seems inadequate for the huge conceptions and deep 
speculations that surge in his mind — that he himself, when it 
reaches its most splendid heights, sees it fall short of the wonder 
and awe of the world which Zeus governs by laws that man's 
experience slowly opens up to him. 

For something cloaked within the night my mind 
Stands listening : — the divine eyes are not blind 
To men of blood : the man of mere success. 
Luck's thriver in defect of Righteousness, 
Doomed by the dark Avengers, wanes at last, 
Dwindling, until he fades out where the dim 
Lost shadows are ; and there, no help for him.^ 

Never before had man so realized the power of mind — 
here was the world reduced to order, to cosmic order and 
moral law, the judgments of Zeus himself tracked to great 
principles which the mind could seize and use — and the world, 
and perhaps Zeus himself, explained. Was not all mind ? 
asked Anaxagoras ; and the wits of Athens, as he walked the 
streets, called him Nous ^ — a sign of how widely the knowledge 

^ Aesch. A gam. 465 f. (trans. W. G. Headlam). 
2 Plut. Pericles, 4. 



44 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

was spread of what the leaders of thought were doing. The 
sense of power marks the age. 

Now let us come a little nearer to Athens, and see what 
is happening in our three spheres of world, and state, and 
thought. 

The great Persian Wars left nothing undisturbed. The 
commercial centre of the world shifted westward. Miletus 
was destroyed, and war checked the inland trade with Asia 
which had made the Ionian seaports great.^ Meanwhile, as 
the graves show, culture was spreading in Italy, and the trade 
with Italians, SiciHans, Etruscans, and Carthaginians, and with 
the Greeks of the West, was growing. Populations were 
increasing, and the supply of home-grown wheat was proving 
too small. Wealth waited for the state that could find and 
control new wheat areas. Athens lay now right in the centre 
of the Greek world, and before long city and harbour were 
linked by strong walls and made into a twin fortress impregnable 
by land. And if she did not own the wheat -growing regions, 
she controlled the trade in grain. The cornfields of Southern 
Russia had only one outlet — ^by the Hellespont, and Athens 
held it — held it in virtue of her fleet of warships. Meanwhile, 
from the days of Solon and Pisistratus foreigners with 
trades had been settling in the city.^ Solon was one of the 
greatest economists of antiquity, and Pisistratus one of the 
shrewdest of rulers ; and they meant to have an Athens 
economically strong and prosperous. Industries grew, and 
free labour moved in from the country, and slave labour was 
imported from abroad. And then the slave began to encroach 
on the freeman's labour market, and the freeman took to another 
and a greater trade — the greatest of all. Empire-ruling ; and 
that too brought wealth to Athens. Mines were opened up, 
and Laureion still continued to yield silver, while on Thasos 
and in Thrace Athenian valour and enterprise made Athenians 
masters of gold production. The horrible condition of the 
slaves in the silver mines of Attica is sometimes noticed by 
ancient writers,^ but there is no indication that it troubled 

1 On this see Chapter VII. ^ Meyer, Gr. Gesch, iii. 538. 

^ On the silver mines, cf. Pint. Nicias, 4 ; Xen. Mem. ii. 5. 2, and 
de vectig. 4, 14, on Nicias' management of his mines ; also Pint. Comp. 
Nic. et Crassi, i. Also compare accounts of washing alluvial gold in 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 45 

the capitalists or the pubUc conseience. Mining and manu- 
facture, grain and the carrying trade of the world, brought 
wealth and brought with it new standards — a new scale for 
the measurement of riches and of poverty — new tastes in 
food, and perhaps a new sense of hunger. 

A comic poet, Hermippos, writing about 429, in a mock- 
heroic passage in Homeric hexameters calls on the Muses in 
their Olympic dwellings to tell hirn how many blessings, 
since ever Dionysos launched on the wine-dark sea, come to 
Athens in black ships. 

With or without their aid he gives a list, which at the risk 
of being tedious I will quote, but in prose. I do not think 
it should be tedious to anyone who wishes to study the life of 
a great people, for more turns on food and standard comforts 
than we sometimes realize, and a list such as this has a story 
to tell of the whole Mediterranean. Some of the imports were 
perhaps not very strictly entered at the Custom House ; a 
comic poet may smuggle a few little items here and there. 

From Cyrene, he says, come the drug silphium and hides of 
cattle ; from the Hellespont, mackerel and all sorts of dried 
fish ; from Italy, spelt (or wheat) and sides of beef ; from 
Sitalkes (king of the Odrysians in Thrace), the itch for the 
Spartans — perhaps what is to be re-exported at once should not 
be reckoned ; from King Perdiccas of the Macedonians, lies by 
the shipload — it is strange to think of these being imported ; ^ 
Syracuse sends pigs and cheese. " And the Corcyraeans — may 
Poseidon destroy them upon their hollow ships, for they have 
their mind this way and that way ! " Then from Egypt come 
sails and cord ; from Syria frankincense ; " fair Crete sends 
cypress for the gods " — probably for temple-building ; Libya, 
abundance of ivory ; Rhodes sends raisins, and figs that give 
you good dreams ; Euboea, pears and " noble sheep " ; Phrygia, 

Lydia, given by Strabo, 626 ; Plut. de virt. muliev. 27 ; Herodotus, vii. 
27 ; Thasos (gold), Plut. Cimon, 14 ; Thrace (gold), Thuc. iv. 105. 

^A journalist during the winter of 1914-15 came very near this 
notion, when he suggested that Salonika had a special industry — the 
manufacture and export of rumour — a trade that kept Greek, Turk, 
and Jew busy, when all the other trades were bad. -- It requires no 
ships to carry it, which is a pity, because the export of rumour would 
make Salonika the busiest shipping place in the world " {Daily News, 
2 March, 191 5). 



46 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

slaves, and Arcadia, soldiers for hire ; Pagasae (the Thessalian 
port), slaves again, and branded slaves at that ; the Paphla- 
gonians send walnuts and rich almonds, '* for these are the 
dainties of the banquet " ; Phoenicia, the fruit of the date-palm 
and fine wheat flour ; Carthage, carpets and embroidered 
cushions.^ 

This list we can supplement from a curious inscription, 
which records the sale of the property of the men condemned 
in 414-3 for the mutilation of the Hermae and the profanation 
of the mysteries. 2 Here is a string of slaves, with the prices 
they fetched. None of them is Greek, and some of them come 
from far-away regions. They had all belonged to Cephisodoros, 
a metic — a foreigner, that is, domiciled in the Peiraieus. The 
list runs thus : — a Thracian woman, 165 drachmas ; another 
Thracian woman, 135 dr. ; a Thracian man, 170 dr. ; a Syrian, 
240 dr. ; a Carian, 105 dr. ; an Illyrian, 161 dr. ; another 
Thracian woman, 220 dr. ; a Thracian, 115 dr. ; a Scythian, 
144 dr. ; an Illyrian, 121 dr. ; a Colchian, 153 dr. ; a Carian 
boy, 124 dr. ; a little Carian boy, 72 dr. ; a Syrian, 301 dr. ; 
a man [or woman, for the last syllable is lost] from MeHttene, 
151 dr. ; a Lydian woman, 170 dr. Another fragment gives 
the bedroom furniture of Alcibiades, which we may leave to 
the purchasers. 

Meantime Athens was becoming an Imperial city. The 
Persian War had left a situation that demanded leadership, 
and Sparta declined the task. Pausanias, her king, behaved 
badly when abroad — '' it was more like an imitation of a 
tjTranny than a commandership," says Thucydides.^ So 
Sparta sent out no more commanders, afraid lest they too 
should degenerate, and wishful in any case to be rid of the 
Persian War.* A later generation moralized this — she pre- 
ferred to have law-abiding citizens than to rule all Greece.^ 

* Hermippos, ap. Athen. 27. Cf. Pericles, in Thuc. ii. 2)^. 2. Also 
Polybius, iv. 38, quoted in Chapter X. p. 305. 

2 Hicks and Hill, Greek Hist. Inscr., No. 72. As a drachma (6 obols) 
was rather a high wage for a rower in the fleet, and 4 obols a fair wage, 
we may roughly reckon a drachma as equal in purchasing power to a 
dollar to-day, and calculate how much our fellow-creatures were worth. 
We are told the price of slaves tended to go down, which implies an 
increased supply. 

» Thuc. i. 95, 3. * Thuc. i. 95, 7. * Plut. Aristides, 23. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 47 

But the fact is, as Thucydides says, Sparta wished to be rid 
of the war ; and the reason was that, as he adds elsewhere, 
most of her arrangements looked toward the Helots, for pro- 
tection against them.^ With a population of agricultural 
serfs — the Messenians among them conscious of ancient 
independence and a glorious struggle for freedom in the past, 
and still able, as the year 370 proved, to assert it and maintain 
it — the Spartans numbered about one-sixteenth of the com- 
munity, and they could not risk foreign war. Defeat, as 370 
showed, and accident, as the earthquake year 464 revealed — 
might be fatal to Sparta at home ; and victory might be as 
bad. The Helot peril was always there. So Sparta gave up 
foreign empire to save her national existence. 

To Athens the leadership of Greece was abandoned ; the 
allies from hatred of Pausanias pressed it on her, and she was 
not reluctant to undertake it.\So the Confederacy of Delos 
was formed, and it grew into an Empire — inevitably, for it 
was not long before the constituent states became weary of 
contribution, and no confederacy can exist as an effective 
force whose members can retire without notice on the spur of 
the moment — on any chance vote of an assembled people. 
" Empire,'* says an Athenian, in the pages of Thucydides, ^ 
'' we did not take for ourselves by force ; you (the Spartans) 
would not wait to finish the war with the barbarian, and the 
allies came to us, and themselves asked us to be leaders. From 
the nature of the case itself we were at first compelled to 
advance our Empire to its present state — fear was our chief 
motive, and then honour, and then interest. It seemed no 
longer safe when many hated us, when some had already 
revolted and been subdued, when we found you no longer as 
friendly as you had been, but suspicious and at variance, to 
run the risk of letting our Empire go, especially as all who 
left us would fall to you. And no one can quarrel with a 
people if, in matters involving the greatest dangers, it make 
the best arrangement it can for itself.'* 

Let us turn now to the sphere of thought. Here a surprise 

awaits us. For we are apt to think of the fifth century in 

Greece, and especially in Athens, as the age of illumination — 

Aufkldrung — the time when, we are told, Anaxagoras and 

1 Thuc. iv. 80. » Thuc. i. 74. 



48 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Socrates and Euripides moulded the thoughts of men. But 
this does not represent the whole situation. It is indeed a 
period of change, when the conservative and the questioning 
spirit met, and when religion shows the influence of both. 
Pericles discussed high philosophy with Anaxagoras, and was 
" filled with speculation " ; ^ but Plutarch's story of the ram's 
head is very illuminative. ^ The head of a ram with one horn, 
he says, was brought to Pericles from his farm ; and Lampon, 
the prophet, seeing the horn grew stiff and strong from the 
middle of the brow, announced the future extinction of the 
party of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, and the sole power 
of Pericles. Anaxagoras, however, split the skull and showed 
some strange malformation within, which afforded a physical 
explanation of the marvel, and he captured the admiration 
of those present. But, when Thucydides was ostracized, and 
Pericles attained his sole guardianship of the state, Lampon 
in his turn was admired. Plutarch urges that both may have 
been justified, and that the discovery of the cause does not 
mean the invalidation of the sign ; but he owns that this 
perhaps belongs to another discussion. The story at any rate 
illustrates the workings of the Athenian mind. And, again, 
Cimon, the earlier rival of Pericles, is the hero of a story as 
significant. When he took the island of Scjnros, he was led 
by the sign of an eagle scratching the earth on a little hill, to 
make a great discovery. An oracle from Delphi had bidden 
Athens recover the bones of Theseus, but none knew where 
they were, save that Theseus had died in Scyros ; and here 
in the little hill a great skeleton was found with a sword and 
a brazen spear. With all possible pomp Cimon brought 
Theseus back to his city after his four hundred years of absence, 
and won great goodwill thereby. So that, as posterity re- 
corded, the people at the next Dionysia gave to him and 
his fellow-generals the decision as to the prize for Tragedy. 
They awarded it, not to Aeschylus, but to the younger poet 
Sophocles ; and the older man took it hardly, and left Athens 
soon after, never to return.^ This belongs to the year 468. 

Perhaps the story is ^rue in fact ; it is certainly true in 
symbol. Sophocles, not Aeschylus, is the great Athenian poet. 
The questions that troubled Aeschylus, and the answers he 
1 Plato, Phaedrus, 269 e, 270. ^ Plut. Pericles, 6. ^ Plut. Cimon, 8. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 49 

found to them, went beyond the common thinking — too far 
beyond it.^ Sophocles they could understand — at least they 
could think they understood him, as men a generation or two 
ago found Browning obscure and Tennyson lucid. '' In- 
imitable, impeccable, unpopular," Sophocles has been called,^ 
but he was not unpopular with his contemporaries. Such a 
play as the Trachiniae, beautiful as Deianira is, would not 
have satisfied either Aeschylus or Euripides. Athens made 
Sophocles a general, to be the colleague of Pericles in 440, in 
the war against Samos, and Ion in his Travels tells of the 
lighter side of the life of the generals at the siege as he witnessed 
it. " But as for political affairs, he was neither very wise 
nor very effective, but just an average good Athenian." ^ 
"^The Samian expedition was a wicked one — as bad as the 
Melian — and Sophocles made no protest, wrote no Troades, 
He stands nearer the common people than Euripides, and in 
his last play, the Oedipus Coloneus, he gives them, at a time 
when Athenian prospects grew dimmer, the comfort once 
more of an old tradition — that the grave of Oedipus in Attic 
ground is to form a perpetual safeguard for Attica against 
foreign invaders. Perhaps this must not be pressed, as 
Euripides alludes to a similar legend of another hero ; but it 
fits in curiously with the deed of Cimon and his poet's 
first victory. 

Delphi had been forgiven by the Greeks for its rallying to 
the Persian, but the defection was not forgotten, and the 
oracle's power for mischief was in some degree weakened. 
But other oracles, .and other scenes of holy games, occupied 
men. The festival, said Strabo of the Delos of a later day, is 
" rather a merchants' affair " * — they all were this, though 
they had in earlier days a higher significance. The clearer 
minds of Greece had not Pindar's enthusiasm for athletics and 
athletes — Xenophanes and Euripides denounced them, but they 
had some flavour of religious association about them still. 

Perhaps the most real religions of Greece — in our modem 
sense — were Orphism and the Eleusinian Mysteries, both cults 
of initiation and purification, secret and awful, in which a 



1 Cf. Meyer, Forsch. ii. 258 ff. 

* Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry, 145. 

^ Ion, ap. Athen. 603. * Strabo, 486. 



4 



50 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

hidden knowledge of another life, a life of woe or of happiness, 
was imparted, and the clue given by which the better path 
might be found. What happened was that men and women 
were put into frames of mind and had emotions, Aristotle 
said> "Quacks and prophets," says Plato,^ "go to rich 
men's doors and persuade them that they have power from 
the gods, by means of sacrifices and chants, to cure any wrong 
deed of their own or their ancestors in a course of pleasures 
and feasts," as if they could " rid us of trouble over there ; 
but if we have not sacrificed, terrible things await us." 
Pericles himself died with an amulet hung round his neck by 
his womenfolk. 2 Foreign gods began to follow their wor- 
shippers to Athens and to gather adherents among Athenians 
— the Phrygian Mother of the gods, Sabazios, Bendis, Ammon, 
and the like. 

It has been remarked that in the famous Funeral Speech 
of Pericles there is no reference to the piety of the Athenians, 
whether Pericles made such a reference or did not. But 
evidence is forthcoming in the historians. Anaxagoras was 
threatened with impeachment for impiety ; but, said posterity, 
Pericles smuggled him out of the city somehow. The same 
charge was brought against Aspasia by Hermippos the comic 
poet.* The terror and cruelty of the Athenians, waked by 
the mutilation of the Hermae, is another evidence of their 
religious attitude, and the career and failure of Nicias illus- 
trates it vividly. But the crowning stroke of the century 
was the hemlock-cup given to Socrates. 

Yet for all this it was the age of enlightenment, when the 
human mind seems to have moved with the greatest power 
and clearness and the highest consciousness of its power. 
If we sum up all that Greece has meant to the world,^'and 
then analyse it, we shall find that, with the sole exception of 
Homer, every Greek writer of the highest rank was living 
sooner or later at some stage of his career in Athens in the 
fifth century — and found it in the main congenial. In every 
sphere of Greek life the zenith seems to be attained by these 

^ Cf. Aristotle, Frag., ed. Heitz, p. 40, quoted by Sj/^nesius, Dio, 
p. 48. 

2 Plato, Rep. ii. 364A-365A. ^ pj^t. Pericles, 38. 

* Plut. Pericles, 32. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 51- 

men. In short, this is the time when, above all, new impulses 
quickened poetry, art, architecture, history, philosophy, and 
music. It was of the very essence of the Periclean conception 
of Democracy that it should be so — what a German scholar ^ 
calls die Aushildung und Geltendmachung der Individualitdt — 
when each individual should achieve his maximum of develop- 
ment and to the utmost of that maximum be available and 
operative for the community. But this has brought us to 
the consideration of Athenian Democracy. 

It is no copy, says Pericles, made from the constitutions 
of neighbours ; rather it is a model — " in a word, I would say 
that our whole state is an education of Greece." ^ Three 
points stand out in his claim, which, without sticking too 
closely to his actual words, we may consider. 

First of all, then, in Athens TroXt? and ttoX/t?;? stand nearest 
in meaning. " The state is in the hands not of the few, but 
of the many." Lydia, Egypt, Persia, and the barbarian tribes 
of the North might have kings or chieftains — 

The enormous rule of many made for one; 

Sparta belonged to a small handful of families, who were main- 
tained by fifteen times their number of serfs, against whom 
every Spartan institution was a part of one huge system of 
safeguard. Thessaly was a country of noble families, Boeotia 
had oligarchies. In every case, as in so many countries to-day, 
the land and the people belonged to the ruler. The civil 
servant and the policeman and the tax-collector — who in 
modern democracies play so large a part — were not the state 
in Athens. The tacit theory, that a good citizen's function 
is to pay his taxes punctually and move on when a policeman 
tells him, is never quite eliminated from the British mind ; 
nor the other equally malign feeling that to be a real citizen 
in a sense worth reckoning one must own land if possible — ^at 
any rate " have a stake in the country " — and hold the great 
traditional opinions, especially in Church matters. Indeed it 
may be said that *' citizen " is in England a lowly word — 
that wakes in the mind the picture of a futile paterfamilias 
writing a dull letter to the local newspaper and signing it 
Pro Bono Publico ; it stands on a level with Ratepayer. 
1 Nestle, Euripides, p. 194. * Thuc. ii. 41, i. 



52 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

But to the Athenian the word had another and a more 
glorious connotation. It stood with its analogue— ^o/^*s and 
polites are an equation. The citizen is the state, in a most 
amazing way. The policeman is a slave, a Scythian, whom 
anybody might have bought at the auction, if the man deputed 
by the state's authority had not gone a drachma or two 
higher. Civil servants hardly existed, and the nearest 
approach to them that Athenians knew they signally despised. 
No boy was born of free parents but might be as much a 
citizen as any other — might lead the Ecclesia, be strategos, 
ambassador, anything that anyone else was. In spite of 
famihes whose names recur, Athenian history is full of new 
names. And there was equality in the law courts — Equal 
Law and Equal Speech are two names for Greek Democracy ; 
and, as the Persian in Herodotus says, " the very name is 
so beautiful."^ The earth is not the lord's, nor justice the 
bought right of the rich. Judges are not made of party 
hacks. Judge and jury were the state — the citizen again, 
grouped in hundreds or thousands as might be ; and any 
man had access to them. Wherever English democracy is 
most conspicuously a sham, Athenian democracy was real. 
No registration laws were made, drafted and designed, to 
jockey the citizen out of his rights. And the natural result 
followed. The Athenian was pleased with his state. Solon, 
in Mr. Zimmem's admirable phrase, associated the idea of 
kindness with the state ; and then, as Pericles put it, the 
citizens fell in love with Athens. 

In the second place, Athenian Democracy, as we saw, asked 
the utmost of every citizen — not merely in blood and money, 
as the modern state does of us all, nor voluntary service on some 
bench of county gentry or board of guardians, but in service 
of every kind — in blood, in money, in brain, in skill of hand, 
in clearness of intellect, in beauty of word and tone, in dedication 
to every public interest. In everything he must take part. 
" Alone among men we consider him who takes no share in 
these matters not quiet or unambitious, but useless." ^ Sq 
Pericles says. One of his successors in high place in Athens 
saw fit to pronounce a eulogy on Stupidity, something in the 
modern style — on the advantages of dullness and not thinking 
1 Herodotus, iii. 80. ^ Thuc. ii. 40, 2. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 53 

oneself cleverer than the laws.^ Pericles praises his people 
for their open eyes and quick minds — " We can judge the issue, 
at any rate, if we cannot ourselves strike out the plan ; and we 
do not hold that discussion spoils action — on the contrary, we 
hold that the want of that sense of things which comes by 
discussion before actual action is the greater danger. It is, in 
fact, our distinguishing mark that the same men will calculate 
the risk and take it ; while elsewhere ignorance gives courage, 
and calculation brings fear. Surely those must be the bravest 
in spirit, who, with the clearest realization of what is terrible 
and what is pleasant, will yet not turn away from danger." 2 

And, lastly, there is the steady humanization of life in 
Athens. " They toil on," says the Corinthian | speaker, ^ 
" with troubles and dangers all the days of their lives, and 
least of all men have any enjoyment of what they have, because 
they will always be getting, because they have no idea of a 
festival but to do what occasion requires, but count easy 
tranquillity as much a misfortune as toilsome occupation. 
So that if one said in a word that they were born never to have 
rest themselves, nor to let others have it, he would speak 
aright." Not at all, says Pericles; no city has so many 
recreations for the human spirit, so many annual contests and 
sacrifices, nor so many pleasures in private life. It cannot be 
better put than in the famous sentence : " We love beauty 
without being extravagant, and we love wisdom without being 
soft." 

Five or six years after Pericles delivered this speech, an 
opponent wrote a small pamphlet on Athenian Democracy in 
the year 424. It is a very remarkable piece of writing, though 
neither the writer's name nor his exact object is known. It 
looks as if, an oligarch in sympathies himself, he were writing 
for others of the same convictions, for men who hated 
Democracy as much as he did, but who did not so fully realize 
the Athenian situation. Did he mean to dissuade them from 
action ? 

" About the constitution of the Athenians," he begins — 
" that they have chosen this kind of constitution, I do not 
praise them, because in so doing they chose that the blackguards 

1 Thuc. iii. ^y ; Cleon's speech. See further in Chapter III. pp. 79, 80. 

2 Thuc, ii. 40, 2, 3, » Thuc. i. 70. 



54 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

should be better off than the decent people. For that I do not 
praise them ; but, since once it seemed good to them, I will 
show that they really manage things well for the preservation 
of their constitution, and are adroit in their other arrangements, 
where to other Greeks they seem to be making mistakes.** 

To this thought he recurs after some pages — *' I forgive 
Democracy to the Demos ; anybody may be forgiven for doing 
well by himself " (2, 20). He does not praise this Democracy, 
but he thinks they act wisely and well from their own point of 
view, which is to keep the form of government they prefer. " In 
every country," he says (i, 5), '* the best element is hostile 
to Democracy " — it has education and insight ; the demos is 
full of ignorance, disorder, and general blackguardliness — the 
common effect of poverty and the pursuits which it involves. 
If then the decent people spoke in the Ecclesia, it would be in 
their own interests and not advantageous to the democrats ; 
so now any blackguardly fellow can get up and say what he 
thinks will suit him and his like (i, 6) — they know well enough 
that his ignorance and goodwill taken together will help them 
more than " the worth and wisdom and dislike of the decent 
man." It means bad government, but it means also the 
continuance of Democracy, and they prefer that. Similarly 
when they deal with allied cities, they deliberately favour the 
worse part of the population ; and where they have not done so, 
it has been a mistake (3, 10, 11). They make the rich pay 
heavily in tragic choruses, gymnasiarchies, trierarchies — and 
they have plenty of festivals — too many, in fact, and the 
business of the law courts is congested. But then the demos 
does well on it — wrestling-grounds, public baths, and so forth 
in plenty — and the rabble has all the good of them, for the 
rich have their own and do not care to use the public ones. 

In Athens, he says, a slave will not make way for you in 
the street, and you cannot punch him for it, for you never can^ 
be sure that he is not a free Athenian. For the free citizens go 
as shabbily dressed, and " they are not a bit better in feature " 
(i, 10). In Sparta things are different — they were indeed. 
But in Athens there is free speech for slave and me tic. Why ? 
Because the city needs the metics on account of the multi- 
tude of trades and of the navy (i, 12). The sea-power of Athens 
he discusses with insight — the advantage of ruling islands. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 55 

of controlling commerce, of managing the law business of all 
the subjects ; and it is after all the masses who row and steer 
the warships, and these make the Empire and secure the com- 
mercial supremacy of Athens, and with it the wealth of the 
city and the imports. Of course if Athens were an island — 
perhaps he is referring to a doctrine Pericles used to enforce — 
the Athenians would be immune from every attack ; but they 
are not an island, and the country folk and the rich get the 
brunt of every invader, while ** the demos, very well knowing 
that they will burn and cut down nothing that belongs to it, 
lives at ease '' (2, 14). 

There, then, stands Athenian Democracy. Many things 
might be thought of to improve it, but they would not be of 
much use, as long as it remained a Democracy ; and there is 
no chance of altering that. There are not enough malcontents. 
And there he ends. 

It does not take very close reading of these two accounts 
of Athenian Democracy to see hints of the uglier aspects which 
the sense of power in a nation may take. The power of the 
human spirit over the material world may prove the emanci- 
pation of the mind, or, on the opposite side, it may lead to 
its final enslavement to the material. What will this new 
power over land and sea mean ? Hermippos and the Athenian 
oligarch suggest it may mean luxury — things to eat and carpets, 
beside raw materials for ship-building and house-building. 
Athenian luxury would seem a poor thing indeed in modern 
England or America ; the limited range in diet and drink, the 
sheer discomfort in household arrangements, even among the 
rich, would be intolerable to our middle and upper classes. We 
forget the lower classes in such reckonings, as the Athenians 
overlooked the slave in the mines. Nicias leased his mining- 
slaves to a contractor, stipulating to receive an obol a day per 
slave, and the same number to be returned to him when the 
contract expired — they could not possibly be the same men.^ 
The growing appeal of Comfort is conspicuous in Athenian 
history — better feeding, less drudgery, less risk, are what men 
want. One way to obtain it is to Hmit the number of children, 
and this in ancient Athens was effected after the children were 
bom. This is evident in many ways. Aristophanes, for 
1 Xen. de vectig. 4, 14. 



56 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

instance, in the parahasis of the Clouds, where the chorus- 
leader speaks on the poet's behalf, uses a metaphor drawn 
from the practice. He was very young when he brought out 
his first comedy — ** I was still a virgin, and it was not permitted 
me to bear a child, so I exposed it, and another girl found 
it and took it up, and you (the audience) nurtured it nobly 
and educated it." ^ A great many of the comedies in a later 
Athenian day depend for their plot on the exposure of girl- 
babies by well-to-do parents. In Plato's ideal state ** the 
issue of inferior parents, and all imperfect children that are 
born to others, will be concealed, as is fitting, in some mysterious 
and unknown hiding-place " ^ — a euphemism, says Dr. Adam, 
for infanticide. " As for the exposure and rearing of children," 
says Aristotle, " let there be a law that no deformed child shall 
live ; but where there are too many (for in our state population 
has a limit), when couples have children in excess, and the 
state of feeling is averse to the exposure of offspring, let abortion 
be procured before sense and life have begun.'* ^ When philo- 
sophers and framers of ideal constitutions accept such practices 
on eugenic grounds, ordinary people will use them for reasons 
with less scientific nonsense about them. 

The state itself may be intoxicated with its own sense of 
power. The utter absence of moral considerations in the 
speeches of public men, as given by Thucydides, is one sign 
of this. The Melian affair is the standard instance — the 
aggression by Athens was unprovoked, and when the place 
surrendered the Athenians killed all the men they took and 
sold the women and children as slaves. This was not out of 
the way in Greek warfare, but in the discussion between the 
Athenian envoys and the Melian magistrates some things are 
said with terrible explicitness. " Of the gods we believe, and 
of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they 
rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first 
to make this law, or to act upon it when made ; ... so, as far 
as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to 
fear the worse." * We learn from Plutarch that Alcibiades, 
though not here named by Thucydides, was largely responsible 

1 Aristophanes, Nub. 5 30. * Plato, Rep. 460c, 

^ Aristotle, Pol. vii. 16, 15, p. 1335& (trans. Jowett). 

* Thuc. V. 105. See also Chapter III. p. 75, for further discussion. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 57 

for the affair of Melos, but when we go back to Pericles himself 
this is what. we find. ''You cannot renounce your empire, 
even if in the panic of the moment some inert spirit is for playing 
the honest man." ^ The triple innuendo is not accident — fear 
— slackness — and the exquisite sense of right and wrong they 
together produce. In Thucydides it is curiously interesting 
to mark how the great Periclean watchwords are caught up by 
Cleon.2 When|Diodotus opposes Cleon's policy of killing the 
Mitylenaeans, he does so, not on moral grounds, but for ex- 
pediency — to spare would be the wiser policy. To such a 
point does the sense of power bring a nation. 

Lastly in the sphere of thought, this same sense of power 
shows the same decline — here into a hard, quick, shallow 
rationalism. If sophist was an honourable term in the fifth 
century, it did not acquire its later connotation by accident. 
One example will do. " This very night," says Socrates, 
** before ever it was dawn, Hippocrates, son of ApoUodorus 
and brother of Phason, fell to beating my door with his stick 
very loudly ; and when some one opened, in he charged at a 
rush, and called out aloud, ' Socrates 1 are you awake or 
asleep ? ' I knew his voice and, ' Hullo ! Hippocrates ! ' I 
cried, * is there any bad news ? ' ' No news at all but good 
news,' said he. ' Good,' said I. ' What is it, and why have 
you come at this time of day ? ' ' Protagoras has come, ' said 
he, and he came and stood by me. ' Just now ? ' said I, ' and 
you have just heard ? ' ' No, by the gods,' he said, ' in the 
evening.' Then he felt for the bed and sat down by my feet, 
and, ' Yes, in the evening,' he said, ' getting here very late 
from Oinoe.' " The young man wants Socrates to speak for 
him to the great teacher. In the morning they go to the house 
where he is staying and with some difficulty get in. Protagoras 
was walking in the long vestibule with some friends and behind 
was a " chorus " — mostly foreigners " whom Protagoras 
gathers from every city, through which he passes, charming 
them with his voice like Orpheus." " And I was particularly 

* Thuc. ii. 63 (Jowett). Professor Gilbert Murray translates it — 
■ * is hankering after righteousness " — in his fine introductory essay to 
his translations of Hippolytus and The Bacchae. 

* See Chapter III. p. 74, on the assonances between Pericles and 
Cleon, in Thucydides. 



5S 



FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



amused," says Socrates, " to watch this chorus — ^how careful 
they were never to get in his way — how, whenever he turned, 
they divided decently and in order this side and that, and fell 
in behind." 

And what had he to tell these eager disciples ? flavrcDv 
fjuirpov avOpoiiro^ ^ — the relativity of knowledge, a certain 
swift and impulsive Pragmatism perhaps — grammar — and, 
" in respect to the gods, I am unable to know either that they 
are or are not." 

What these successive sophists did may be best seen in 
the Callicles whom Plato draws with such skill in the Gorgias — 
an eager, quick, splendid figure, full of ideas with which after 
some centuries Nietzsche has come forward again. " It is only 
by custom and convention that doing wrong is more disgrace- 
ful ; by nature what is worse is more disgraceful — suftering 
wrong, to wit. This suffering, this submission to wrong, is not 
a man's part — it's a slave's, who had better die than live — 
whoever he is who cannot help himself against wrong and insult, 
himself and those he cares about. The law makers, to be sure, 
are the weak and the many. It is with a view to themselves 
and their own interest that they frame their laws and bestow 
praise and blame, to frighten those who are more powerful, and 
who might take advantage of them, into not taking advantage 
of them ; so they tell them that self-seeking is disgraceful and 
unjust," and so forth. ^ In fact, Melos in daily life. 

Callicles is not alone. There is Critias, the friend of 
Socrates, whose account of the origin of the gods Sextus 
P^mpiricus preserved for us. Life, he says, was full of disorder, 
so at last men made laws to punish it ; but the laws could not 
see in the dark ; and then some shrevv^d and witty man invented 
gods who could see in the dark — could with the mind see and 
hear, think, and mark aU said and done among men. It was 
a pleasant and a helpful device — " with a false reason covering 
truth." The gods would dwell, where thunder and lightning 
might lead men to expect them ; and so *' he quenched lawless- 
ness with laws." 

The sense of power is a great thing for a nation or for a man. 
But it seems that something else is needed as well — some other 
principle on which life can rest. That men of Athens realized 

1 See Chapter IX. p. 279. ^ piato, Gorg. 483 b. 



THE AGE OF PERICLES 59 

this also and set themselves to find some new foundation for 
society, to study human life till they should find in it what 
does in fact keep it from the utter dissolution threatened by the 
unchartered freedom of the new schools ; and that they did 
find a truth in human life and human society deeper and 
stronger than the weapons of sophistry and man's baser 
instincts could uproot or destroy — is part of the glory of this 
wonderful century. 



CHAPTER III 
THUCYDIDES 

IT is difficult to think of any great book that has per- 
manently held the interest of mankind without some 
element of autobiography. To reach the heart, as Goethe 
said, a book must come from the heart ; and that is auto- 
biography at once. It may be that the writer frankly takes 
us into his confidence like Herodotus and Horace among the 
ancients, or Montaigne and Charles Lamb in modern times ; 
though even the frankest of authors has something he keeps 
to himself. On the other hand, there is the other type — the 
man who sinks himself and his affairs deliberately and of 
purpose ; and yet, in his case too, his own experience of life 
will be written in every sentence, whether we can read it or 
not. An outlook is implied in every judgment upon life — in 
every judgment upon an individual man or his chance act ; 
and an outlook, if we can see or feel what it is, reveals a per- 
sonality. The great writer may hide himself, he may do his 
utmost to make his writing (in our modem phrase) objective, 
but his very reticence only adds to his impression. It is 
only makers of lexicons and manuals who achieve the 
objective, and such works die or never live. 

" The War, of which Thucydides, son of Olorus, wrote the 
history," has never failed to interest mankind, so momentous 
the issues, so vivid and so various the force of the writer. 
But perhaps he never guessed how profound would be the 
interest, quite apart from the story, which his readers would 
feel in the great character that moves through the great events 
and makes them live, that looks into life so profoundly, that 
feels so intensely, and, using a style so restrained, so artificed 
and so cold, can yet inflame the reader with a throbbing love 
of Athens, despite all the faults and the crimes which he so 
relentlessly lays bare. 



THUCYDIDES 6i 

All that we really know of the man, he tells us himself — 
tells us to authenticate his work and to explain how it came 
to be what it is — baffling the curiosity he provokes. That his 
name would live he must have known ; he cannot but have 
felt what he was doing when he wrote his own name and his 
father's and the name of his city into a work that was to be 
*' a possession for ever " ; and he was content to leave the 
matter there. The ancients tell us one thing and another 
about him, long afterwards — some of their information being 
trivial and wrong, some of it significant if we could be sure of 
it. But, when all is added up and weighed, the biography 
is a short one. 

His father's name was Olorus, he tells us, and in the next 
chapter (iv. 105, i) he adds in his curious way, that " Brasidas 
learnt that Thucydides had rights of working the mines in 
that region of Thrace, and from that had influence among 
the chief men of the mainland." Plutarch says that Olorus 
had his own name from an ancestor,^ and modern scholars 
have made the easy guess that he called his son after the 
statesman, Pericles' rival, the son of Melesias. The ancestor 
Olorus, if we can rely on him, was a Thracian prince, it appears, 
or a chief, if prince is too large or too modern a term. Plutarch 
adds that father and son were connected with the family of 
Cimon, son of Miltiades, that the mines were gold-mines at 
Scapte Hyle, that the historian was murdered there, and his 
body brought to Athens and buried with the house of Cimon, 
alongside Elpinice, Cimon' s famous sister ; but he remarks 
that they belonged to different demes. The family of Miltiades, 
since the days of Pisistratus, had had Thracian and princely 
connexions, but scholars are divided as to whether or not to 
accept the kinship of the historian with the great house. 2 
With the acceptance of it comes a further question as to his 

1 Cimon, 4. Herodotus, vi. 93, says the Thracian father-in-law 
of Miltiades was called Olorus. The historian's grandfather may have 
given his son a fancy name, as Periander of Corinth called his son 
Psammetichos. Cimon himself, as his political opponents noted, 
gave his sons foreign names and fancy ones, after the states for which 
he was proxenos — viz. Lacedaimonios, Thessalos, and Eleios. 

* Busolt doubts it; Grote, v. 275 n., and Hermann Peter, Wahrheit 
und Kunst, p. 105, accept it. It seems probable enough, if not quite 
proven. 



62 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

attitude to Pericles, which we shall have to discuss. The 
rider that '* Thucydides' Greek is at best good Thracian " ^ 
need not perhaps occupy us very long. 

That his youth and education were essentially Athenian 
is plain to read on every page of his work. All the main 
impulses and interests of Athens are there — rhetoric, tragedy, 
philosophy, empire, autonomy, and political theory. He owes 
his education to sophists, poets, philosophers, soldiers, and 
statesmen — to Athens. UoXt? dvBpa BcBdo-KeL.^ He embodies 
in himself what has been called the unity or integrity of the 
age of Pericles. His early manhood must have fallen in the 
days when Pericles was at the very height of his power, for 
when the Peloponnesian War began, he was *' of an age to 
take it in and understand it," ^ and he expected it to be a 
great war and of unique importance.* What is more, after 
a very few years he was actually elected general. When the 
plague came to Athens in 430, Thucydides was there and took 
it and recovered. He had already his lifelong passion for 
accurate detail — it was probably born in him ; and, sick as 
he was, he carefully noted his symptoms, and left in writing 
the most famous description of a disease that antiquity has 
given us. More interesting still, for our present purpose, is 
the consideration of his election as general for the year 424. 

Human nature, he suggests — and Goethe says it too — is 
apt to be much the same in all ages, and a political election 
campaign must have had many features in his day which are 
not unfamiliar in our own. There were ten generals to be 
elected annually to serve for a year, and the records, incom- 
plete as they are, suffice to show that more often than not 
both parties carried seats on the board. Both parties, it is 
clear, must have selected their candidates with care ; and 
that party management was very much the same then as 
now is evident from the occurrence of " deals " or '* saw-off s '* 
of the most modern kind.** We may therefore ask how Thucy- 

1 Quoted by Mr. Grundy. 

2 Further discussion of this phrase of Simonides in Chapter VI. p. 167. 

3 Thuc. V. 26, I, €7r€^i(ov be dia iravros avroVf alarBavofxevosTe rfj rjXtKia . . . 
* Thuc. i. I, I, first sentence. In i. 21. 2, he notes that we always 

think the present war the greatest — till it is over. 

^ e.g, the ostracism of Hyperbolus, Plut. Nicias, 1 1 ; Alcib. 13. 



THUCYDIDES 63 

dides came to be on a ** ticket/* and on which '' ticket '* he 
was.^ Then as now many factors would contribute to a man's 
selection — distinction in war, gifts of speech, availability. 
In 441 the poet Sophocles was elected general neither for 
renown in battle nor political eloquence, but because in that 
year he had produced the Antigone.'^ It was not till the days 
of the decline of Athens that the Greeks drew or felt the English 
distinction between men of genius and practical people, and 
a Eubulus was preferred to Demosthenes. But in 425 Cleon 
would hardly have tolerated a picturesque candidate, and his 
opponents could not have afforded to risk one. In any case, 
Thucydides was not a poet of Panhellenic fame. 

It seems generally accepted that Thucydides was a candi- 
date of the Moderates, the party that preferred peace, and, if 
possible, some kind of friendly understanding with Sparta. 
A very serious juncture in the fortunes of Athens had come, 
and the election for 424 was bound to be of the utmost moment 
— peace or war.^ Cleon was at the height of his power, the 
successful leader of the war-party. In the elections for 425 he 
and his had suffered, but the brilliant affair of Sphacteria and 
the arrival of the Spartan prisoners in Athens within the 
twenty days — following the failure of Nicias* clever move 
about the generalship — had altered everything. There would 
be no more talk of peace — Spartan embassies might come, but 
they could go home with nothing done — the Athenians " desired 
more," as the historian says,* and more they got. Cleon took 
in hand the matter of the tribute of the allies, and doubled 
it. The opposition co-operated with the allies in the matter, 
Antiphon (Thucydides' friend) wrote speeches for the Lindians 

1 In these paragraphs I have followed the common view. If the 
question is asked, How do we know that Thucydides was not of Cleon's 
party to start with, and that his dislike of Cleon is not the outcome of 
the exile that followed the command at Amphipolis ? — the answer is 
that for such a view there is no evidence at all ; it would be pure guess- 
work. The reconstruction given above has admittedly conjectural 
elements, but it seems to fit in with what we know. 

2 On Sophocles as general, see fragment of Ion (in Athenaeus, xiii. 
603E), who speaks of the poet himself, saying that Pericles had said 
he knew how to write poetry, but was no strategist. 

^ See Beloch, Attische Politik, 37-42. 

* Thuc. iv. 21, 2 ; an echo of the phrase in Isocrates, de Pace, 7, 
when in 355 B.C. he is arguing for Peace and against Empire. 



64 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and the Samothracians, and the well-to-do grumbled as ever 
yet at the cost of war and of democratic government. But 
Cleon had his way, and to clinch his power he raised the pay for 
service in the Ecclesia from two obols to three. Aristophanes 
might attack this in his Knights (424 B.C.), but the extra obol 
had attractions for poor voters in a time of war prices. 

The peace party would need to look well to it if they were 
to make any impression on the power of Cleon. Why they 
should have selected Thucydides, we do not know — whether his 
wealth, or his interests in Thrace, or kinship with the family 
of Cimon, decided it, or some proof given of political or military 
gifts, distinction won or foreshadowed in some campaign, or 
speech of appeal in the Ecclesia — he does not explain. He 
only incidentally records that he was general for the year 424. 
We know also that the party carried its leader, Nicias, and two 
others, Autocles and Nicostratos — four at any rate out of the 
ten. 

It would hardly have been human if Thucydides had not 
felt some satisfaction at the election. But it was to be the ruin 
of his career at once, if in the long run the foundation of a 
greater and more lasting fame than fell to many a successful 
strategos. " It befell me to be in exile from my country," he 
wrote, " for twenty years after the generalship at Amphipolis " 
(v. 26, 5). The story needs no re-telling. Brasidas was too 
quick for the Athenian general in charge of the fleet, and the 
city was lost. It stood on the river Strymon, commanding the 
river- way into the interior and the road along the coast ; it 
was a centre, too, from which Athens had a part of the timber 
supply on which her fleet depended ^ and some part also of her 
revenues. It was for Athens' enemies at once a brilliant 
triumph, and a military, political, and commercial gain of the 
utmost significance. It promised the subject allies of Athens 
that freedom which Sparta had held out to them in 432 B.C. ; 
and though she was soon to abandon her promise quite ruth- 
lessly, still, as long as Brasidas lived, there was no predicting 
the outcome. 

So it befell Thucydides to be in exile. It is interesting to 
note how modem historians have debated his case — was he 
guilty or not guilty ? Grote definitely holds " the positive 

1 Thuc. iv. 108. 



THUCYDIDES 65 

verdict of guilty fully merited." ^ Thirlwall brings Thucydides 
in not guilty — " human prudence and activity could not have 
accomplished more than Thucydides did under the same 
circumstances." ^ xhe Germans, it appears, are similarly 
divided. Eduard Meyer clears the air with a verdict of his 
own — " the way in which moderns, quite in Cleon's manner, 
tell the ancient generals what they should have done is most 
desperately naive." ^ The fact surely is that we are not 
in possession of evidence enough to warrant any decision. It 
may suffice to see what Thucydides says about it. 

At first sight, it appears that he says nothing — neither 
confesses to guilt, nor offers defence. He does not even say 
who proposed the decree of his exile. Antiquity guessed that 
it was Cleon, which is likely enough, unless the great man put 
up a follower to do it, as sometimes happened in old days and 
happens still. Hence, by a conclusion, as easy as the guess on 
which it rests, came the feeling which is always present when 
Thucydides writes of Cleon.* But before we embark on the 
share of Cleon in the affair, for which we have no evidence 
at all, we had better be done with the case of Thucydides. 
All that we actually have to rest on is a number of judgments 
upon military matters, which taken together suggest an ex- 
planation. 

First of all, then, there is the famous judgment upon Cleon's 
engagement to bring the Spartans on Sphacteria prisoners 
to Athens within twenty days. It was "mad" — the talk 
of a madman — fjuavccoBr)^. So Thucydides describes it in 
spite of the fact that Cleon made good his word.^ '' No 
sentence," says Grote, *' throughout the whole of Thucydides 
astonishes me so much." ^ And yet, within fifteen years or so, 
Anytos sailed with a fleet to relieve Pylos, the very place, and 
was held up off Cape Malea by winds, and the Spartans re-took 
it (410 B.C.).' Similarly, when Constantinople fell to the Turks 
in 1453, a relieving fleet was at no great distance— at Tenedos, 
just outside the Dardanelles — and there it stayed, wind-bound 
for weeks. Landsmen are at a loss in criticizing the conduct 

1 Grote, vi. 191 fE. 2 Thirlwall, ch. xxiii. 

3 Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iv. § 599. * Life, by Marcellinus, 46. 

** Thuc. iv. 39. * Grote, vi. 127. 

' Diod. Sic. xiii. 64 ; that at least was the received explanation. 

5 



66 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

of fleets and admirals ; they neither know what a ship can do 
nor what it cannot — and both are surprising. Who but a 
maniac would undertake to control the winds round Cape 
Malea for twenty days ? 

Again and again, in the Speeches, Thucydides reiterates 
how incalculable a thing war is. " Consider," say the 
Athenians in the First Book, '* the vast influence of accident 
in war. ... As it continues, it generally becomes an affair 
of chances " (i. 78, i, 2). " War of all things," say the Cor- 
inthians, " proceeds least upon set rules " (i. 122). " Remem- 
ber," says Nicias toward the end at Syracuse, '* the accidents 
in w^ars, and hope that chance may be with us" (vii. 61, 3). 
So apparently thought the Duke of Wellington, who told 
Creevey on the day after Waterloo that it was " a damned 
near-run thing — the nearest thing he had ever seen." So 
thought not the Athenians.^ In 424 they banished and fined 
the generals who had left Sicily as a result of the congress of 
Gela — sent home by the allies who had called them in, and 
wanted them now no more. " So thoroughly had the present 
prosperity persuaded the citizens that nothing could withstand 
them, and that they could achieve what was possible and what 
was impracticable alike, whether with ample equipment or 
inadequate, indifferently." With these strong words Thucy- 
dides leaves the fortunes of Eurymedon and his colleagues — 
words that students have been quick to apply to his own case.^ 

For twenty years Thucydides was in exile. It has been 
conjectured that it was not an ordinary form of exile, but one 
which compelled him to avoid all contact with Athenians for 
fear of arrest — a condemnation for treachery — so completely 
is he excluded from Athenian information.^ Even if this 
suggestion goes too far, exile had not for an ancient Greek the 
alleviations of to-day. He was everywhere uncomfortable, 
everywhere more or less liable to injustice and ill-usage — 
Athens perhaps excepted. And there was moreover within 

1 *- A sharp-witted but thoughtless democracy " is the happy phrase 
of Mr. Lamb, Clio Enthroned, p. 164. 

^Thuc. iv. 65. Of. also iii. 115, the case of Laches, parodied by- 
Aristophanes in the Wasps ; and Plut. Nicias, 6, that of Paches, who 
committed suicide in the court. 

3 Grundy, Thuc. p. 35. 



THUCYDIDES 67 

him a passion for his native place that would drive him to 
strange lengths. Pericles had bidden his fellow-citizens be 
lovers of Athens — ipaarai, his term, is not our quiet and 
natural word, but a word of passion, blind, unreasoning, and 
wild, the passion of a young man for a woman ; and epoxi 
again is the word Thucydides uses, and Plutarch after him, 
to describe the mad infatuation that fell on the Athenians to 
go to Syracuse. Such a passion for the native land it was 
that induced Greeks, not in a single case, but in many, to 
inflict on their country any wound, any disaster, any shame, 
if only they might live at home, and be exiles no more. What 
matter if instead of being great the city was small now, free 
no longer, but a vassal to Sparta, or Athens, or Persia — the 
exile was home again. ^ It is not to be thought that Thucy- 
dides would have paid such a price to live in Athens, but we 
have to realize how men hated exile and longed for home, and 
the familiar scene, with all the associations of friendship and 
childhood, of family grave and local cult — and safety. One 
chance of return Thucydides had, when in 411 the Four 
Hundred became masters of the city. There was hope then 
for an exile, but " they did not recall the exiles because of 
Alcibiades " (viii. 70). 

He seems to have spent his years, at any rate partly, in 
travel among the scenes of action of the war. Pylos, modern 
travellers tell us, he did not see ^ — not even Thomas Arnold's 
geological changes will reconcile them to his account of the 
place ; it is not the work of a man who saw it. How should 
he see it, while his countrymen held it ? Plataea he never 
saw either — what interest had it for an Athenian before the 
siege, or how, again, could he visit it after the siege ? But he 
seems to have a personal knowledge of the regions of Demos- 
thenes' famous campaign in Aetolia, and of the topography of 
Syracuse.^ Sparta, it appears, he visited. To Italy he hardly 

1 Ille terrarum mihi pvaetev omnes angulus ridet (Horace, Odes, ii. 
6, 13). Cf. the proverb eKj/n 2uXoo-a>j/ros evpux^P^'?' Strabo, 6^,^ ; Herodotus, 
iii. 149. 

* Cf. Grundy, Thuc. p. 25. 

' Freeman, Hist, of Sicily, iii. p. 595 : --To my mind the signs that 
he had gone over every inch of the ground of the Syracusan siege are 
beyond all gainsaying. . . . The oftener I read his text, the oftener I 
step out the ground, the more thoroughly do I feel that the two fit 



^ 



68 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

went — ^his use of the name is remarked as covering only a small 
part of the land, and he confuses Etruscans and Campanians. 
The outlying regions of the world which Herodotus travelled 
with such delight, he let alone — Egypt, Asia Minor, and the 
East. But his account of Macedon seems to imply knowledge, 
and gratitude has been traced in the language he uses of 
Archelaus.^ Macedon was near and not too Athenian. 

One curious if doubtful relic of a residence at the court of 
Archelaus survives in the four-lined stanza, which the ancients 
say Thucydides wrote to commemorate Euripides who died 
at that court, far from his country, but a voluntary exile. 

Greece is thy monument, Euripides, 

In Macedon laid, where thou didst end thy days ; 

Thy country Athens, veriest Greece of Greece ; 
The Muse thy joy, and everywhere thy praise. ^ 

The utmost that we can say about the epitaph is that it is 
ascribed in a number of places to Thucydides, though such 
ascriptions are easy and tempting to certain types of mind. 
That the sentiment of the third line is that of Thucydides, we 
need only turn to the great Funeral Speech of Pericles to see. 
There is no Greece but Athens after all. If the rivals of Athens 
did not admit this in the historian's day, all Greece and all the 
world felt it in time. 

Meantime the years of exile dragged on, not without their 
influence on Thucydides. He wrote, he travelled, he watched 
men and events,^ he thought, he developed his gnarled and 
involved style and pursued his inquiries with a deepening 
sense of the value of accuracy and precision — to aKpL^e^ — 
in knowledge and in speech. His banishment, as he said, 

into one another in the minutest detail." Mr. W. E. Heitland {Journal 
of Philology, xxiii. p. 68) doubts whether Thucydides ever visited 
Syracuse — ^this after -' a hard week's work on the ground " in 1883. 
Grundy, Croiset, and others side with Freeman. 

1 Thuc. ii. 100. 

2 Anth. Pal. vii. 45 : 

fivrjiJ^a fi€v 'EWas a.Tracr' 'EvptTrlBov' ocrrea S' 'lcr)(€i 

yrj MaKedav' fj yap de^aro ripfia ^iov' 
"TrarpXs S' "EXXados- 'EXXas 'A^)}i/af TrXeTo-ra he Movam^ 

repyfraSf efc TroXkav Koi rov eiraLvov e^ci. 

3 Lamb, Clio Enthroned, pp. 35-38, remarks his attention to trade 
and its effects on cities and civilization. 



THUCYDIDES 69 

threw him among the Peloponnesians and gave him a chance 
to understand somewhat more of them in quiet. ^ He learnt 
and took pains to write something of their miHtary system 
and its efficiency. ^ Incidentally he rebukes an author whom 
he does not name for speaking of the Pitanates lochos — a 
regiment with a local name. Herodotus ought to have known 
there was no such thing — " so careless is the inquiry for truth 
with many men, and they are more apt to turn to what lies 
ready to hand." ^ But the Spartans, as he says, preferred to 
make a secret of their constitution and of all they did.* They 
had no ambition, it seems, to be *' the education of Greece," 
and when foreigners learnt too much they put them over the 
frontier. 5 

But exile must have had results of more significance than 
mere opportunities of information. What effect had it on 
the man's mind, on his whole nature ? Here we can only 
make guesses, as we have so little knowledge of him before 
he was banished. Yet a thoughtful man, cut off from all that 
is dear and familiar, does not spend his days moving about 
from one strange scene to another without penetrating deeper 
into the realities of life. He gets outside the parish, outside 
the island, beyond the conventions, the traditions, and the 
common values, as year after year he sees the cities of many 
men and learns their mind. Solitude drives him into 
reflection, and intensifies a native severity of thought. He 
comes back to Athens a stranger, a man forgotten, to a 
changed city. The native land is never the same after 

1 V. 26, 5. 2 V. 66, 67. 

' i. 20, 3, a chapter in which he picks out three famous errors — the 
Athenian tyrannicides and the Spartan king's two votes being the 
other subjects of his criticism. Ovras dTaXaiTrapos — the phrase has often 
come to my mind as I have Hstened to talk about the great European 
War. 

* V. 68. 

^ I cannot help wondering also whether Thucydides had any contact 
with Alcibiades during the years they were both in exile ; note how he 
knows what Alcibiades did in Sparta, and who were his friends and his 
enemies there, and how he advised Endios, vi. 88-93 > ^ii. 18 ; viii. 
6, 12 ; in and about Asia, viii. 14-17, 26 ; at the court of Tissaphernes, 
and what advice he gave him, viii. 45, 46, 52, 56, 82 ; and the sentence 
in viii. 70, recording that the exiles were not recalled " because of 
Alcibiades." 



70 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

years abroad. Caesar came back to Rome after eight years 
in Gaul a new man, free as he had not been before, in virtue of 
new thoughts and new experiences, with a quicker and surer 
instinct to base himself on the real and the ultimate. Why 
has Thucydides so very little to say of Athenian politics ? Of 
Cleon he speaks, but Hyperbolus — a sentence suffices to 
chronicle the death of the wretched creature (fjLoxOrjpbv 
avOpcoTTov), as if in life he did not count, but his death were a 
sign of the times, a manifesto, to be noted ; ^ and yet the 
vigour with which Aristophanes attacks Hyperbolus suggests 
that the poet thought he mattered. Did the ebb and flow, 
the storms and passions, of party life in Athens matter — any 
of it, all of it ? Once he had been in the thick of it — chosen 
to be on a " ticket " — ^but how little it all meant ! When poUcies 
have to be discussed in the History, it is " the Athenians'* 
who do this or that, who ** speak as follows.*' ^ But in each case 
there was a meeting of the ecclesia, a debate, points made, 
advantages scored, a vote taken, a policy carried and a policy 
lost, reputations risen and fallen. Was there ? How little it 
signifies after ten, fifteen, twenty years of absence ! Strange 
thoughts grow 

About the life before I lived this life. 

What a contrast between the living pictures Aristophanes 
gives of it, and the indifference of Thucydides ! "All is done 
well," says the king leaving Troy, in Euripides' play, 

" if ought of it all is well." After all, what happens in the 
assembly or anywhere else only matters as it takes one into 
the human mind ; and exile gives leisure to track out some of 
what Dr. Johnson called the mind's anfractuosities. 

On the other hand it is often true that a man never knows 
his country and his people till he sees them from without as 
well as from within, from a distance as well as at close quarters 
— till he is so detached in life and thought that his heart will 
not confuse his head. What did Athens mean ? Let a man 

1 Thuc. viii. 73, 3 ; a passage which suggests personal contempt. 

2 Dionysius, de Thuc. 14, 15, § 842, cannot make out the principle 
on which Thucydides elects to give a speech on one occasion and not 
on another. 



« 



THUCYDIDES 71 

try the brawling sensual democracy of S5n:acuse — or Sparta 
and its machine-made life — or Macedon, where a brilliant 
usurper is forcing civilization on clans and cantons — or Thrace 
among the gold mines, even if they are his own. What would 
anybody — any man of years and mind — want to live in 
Thessaly for ? asks Socrates in the Crito.^ No, Athens after all, 
deduct what you like, what you must, it is the place ; and 
we shall see why in a little. 

At last the long war was over — as significant in its issues as 
Thucydides had divined from the beginning that it would be — 
a disaster for all Greece in its long course, for " war takes away 
the easy supply of daily wants and is a violent teacher " ^ — 
a manifold disaster in its outcome. Athenian democracy was 
overthrown, and the tyranny of the Thirty took its place. 
The exiles returned — no modern Englishman can readily feel 
what that sentence implies.^ Pausanias long after tells us 
that there was a vote for the recall of Thucydides proposed by 
a man Oenobios, but he adds that he (apparently Thucydides) 
" was murdered on his way back, and there is a monument to 
him not far from the Melitid gate." * There is confusion here, 
since it is evident that Thucydides lived to see his country 
again — saw it in its humiliation, stripped of the great walls, for 
he proves a point as to their swift building in Themistocles* 
times, from their foundations '* of all sorts of stones," visible 
to-day — stelae from graves, stones wrought and un wrought, 
such as chanced to be handy. ^ A strange picture — the old 
exile home again going to the razed walls to test the accuracy 
of a point in history. 

He lived a few more years, busied as for so long with his 
History, and writing now, as some critics acutely suggest, 
some of its most impressive parts. From certain small 

^ Plato, Crito, 53D-54A. 

2 Thuc. iii. 82, 2. Professor Cramb, in his Germany and England, 
renders or paraphrases ^iatos Mda-KaKos as ** stern discipUnarian." If 
this is right, we shall have to revise our view of the historian's opinion 
of Cleon ; ^taioTaros tSjv rroXiTrnv (iii. 36) has not hitherto been con- 
sidered praise. On the advantage of wealth as contributing to morals, 
see old Cephalos in Plato, Rep. i. 33 ib. 

^ Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 23, and ii. 3, 15, Critias irpo7r€Tr)s rjv enl ro 
noXkovs aTTOKTelveiVf arc Koi (f)vya)v vrro rod drjfxov. 

* Pausanias, i. 23, 1 1. ^ Thuc. i. 93. 



72 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

indications,^ mostly silences, it is held that his death probably 
fell in or about the year 399 — where, we cannot guess. The 
ancient story as to his being murdered, with its variants as to 
place, may rest merely on the fact of his work being unfinished 
— or it may be true ; there is no telling. Marcellinus states 
that some said the Eighth Book ** was a bastard," either from 
his daughter's hand or Xenophon's, but '* it was not in feminine 
nature to imitate such -gifts and such skill," and the book 
" all but shouts " ((jlovov ov^i jSoa) that Thucydides wrote it, 
though some more exquisite critics {to2<; 'xapiearTepoLs) think 
that he only roughed it out and did not give it the finish 
that he would have wished. ^ In any case, the life was over 
before the work was done, for it is clear that his purpose was 
to tell the story of the whole war. 

We have now to turn to the man's life-work, and, without 
analysing it or pausing to discuss it in any detail, to use it to 
learn something of the man himself ; and we may begin with 
the Athenian and his people. 

As we saw before, Thucydides is Athenian through and 
through — in education, in spirit, in feeling, in heart, whatever 
detachment years and loneliness and exile may have given him. 
But to be Athenian did not connote approval of all that 
Athenians were and did. The gift of self-criticism was not 
denied to the most gifted people of antiquity, and the worst 
that we know of Athens comes, like the best, from her sons — 
a fact that perplexed simple natures in a less complicated age 
of Greece. Dionysius of Halicarnassus — " ce bon Denys 
d'Halicarnasse," as Boissier called him — is quite definite on 
this point and one or two others. 

A historian's first task, his chief task, says Dionysius,^ is 
to choose a theme noble and acceptable to those who shall 
read it ; but Thucydides writes of a war neither noble nor 

1 Some of them are very trifling. Most people would hardly find, 
or feel, any reference to the trial of Socrates in the statement as to 
Antiphon's defence, viii. 62>y 2. This was a suggestion of Classen, 

2 Some modern critics have the same view ; they consider the absence 
of speeches a sign of interrupted work. The last broken sentence may 
either be evidence of an abrupt end of his labours, or of an accident to 
his MS. 

2 Letter to Pompeius, ch. 3, pp. y6y-y6g, 774. Contrast Lu'cian, 
Quomodo Histofia, 38, 51. 



THUCYDIDES 73 

fortunate, a war that had better never have happened at all, 
or at least would be better forgotten. He made his beginning 
at the very moment when things began to go ill with the 
Greek world ; which, as a Greek and an Athenian, he ought 
not to have done — a man too of the first rank, whom the 
Athenians had honoured with the generalship and other 
things ; and lie did it with such obvious malice, that though 
he might have found causes elsewhere, he attached the blame 
for the war to his own city. His disposition was stubborn 
and bitter, and he had a grudge against his country, because 
of his exile. He emphasizes her failures with great precision 
— here the critic uses the historian's own adverb, koX ^aXa 
a/cpi/3m — and what went to her mind, he either does not 
mention at all or as if by constraint. 

So wrote Dionysius, himself a historian in many books ; 
but, as with Plutarch, so in his case we have to note that 
Greek subjects of the Roman Empire lacked something needful 
for the intelligence of Greeks of more spacious days. Still he 
raises some questions, and to solve them we must go to 
Thucydides himself. How did he feel toward his people and 
their government and their ideals in the long run ? 

Nicias, as we have seen, was his party leader — curious 
as it is to write it — and it was on the " ticket " of Nicias that 
he was elected general. For Cleon there can be no doubt 
that he had a great dislike or distaste. We need not say with 
the ancients that it was because Cleon got him banished ; 
the man, with his maniacal brags, with his reckless, headlong 
violence in speech, in policy, and in fight, was antipathetic — 
and so was the whole school of them, the *' dynasty of dealers," 
as Aristophanes called them — the men who would have war 
at any price, who refused again and again to have peace when 
it could have been had with triumph and empire, and yet 
again when it was needed to heal the country and could still 
have been had with honour, and finally when no sane man 
could have dreamed there w^as any other hope even of a 
national existence. Quite apart from the vulgarity of mind 
that the dynasty of dealers showed, clever leaders and able 
financiers as some of them undoubtedly were, they never 
realized the actual world in which they lived. It is a fine 
stroke when Thucydides sets in Cleon's mouth the complaint 



74 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

against idealogues, as Napoleon called them, men, who, in 
Cleon's phrase, " seek something else, so to speak, than the 
conditions under which we live." ^ What else did all the 
Cleons and Cleophons do — living on hopes and teaching their 
fellow-citizens to count everything possible ** whether feasible 
or impracticable, with proper outfit or deficient, indifferently " ? 
Many views have been held about Thucydides' own political 
leanings. Some have put together his supposed connexion 
with the house of Cimon and the great picture that he draws 
of Pericles, and have deduced a change of camp — the colossal 
genius of Pericles detached him from his hereditary loyalties. 
There is no one who has given a more brilliant presentment of 
all that we associate with Pericles, and yet as we pass on 
from his speeches to Cleon's we find phrases we have met 
before — strange assonances and echoes of Pericles himself. 
How do they come there ? Did Cleon quote Pericles when 
he addressed the Assembly ? He had been Pericles' opponent 
on the extreme Left, out-demagoguing him as a clever extremist, 
not yet entrusted with responsibility, so easily may. He 
might very well have borrowed his language in later days — 
and how curious that it should be so ! Much has been said 
of Thucydidean irony, but " irony " is a doubtful word at 
best ; it tells us too much or too little. But if ever a historical 
work was wrought all over, till every hint of assonance or 
turn of phrase seems to the reader to be meant, to be deliberate 
and conscious, it is Thucydides' History, above all in its 
speeches. How curious then that Cleon slips so naturally 
into the language of his great predecessor for all the contrasts 
patent between them ! Is Cleon the heir of Pericles — heir to 
his policy and to his language ? Is the massacre of the 
Mitylenaeans the natural outcome of the magnificence, im- 
perial and Panhellenic, of Pericles ? In Athens, it is the 
boast of Pericles, life is more human, more neighbourly, 
kinder, richer, than elsewhere. *' Do not be misled," shouted 
Cleon, slapping his thigh,^ ** by those three things most 
hostile to an empire — by pity, by beautiful language, by 
sweet reasonableness." ^ They stand very far apart ; and 

1 Thuc. iii. 38, 7. 2 pi^-t. Nicias, 8. 

^ Thuc. iii. 40, 2 — eirLeUeia is the word; I give Matthew Arnold's 
rendering of it, in another connexion. 



THUCYDIDES 75 

yet they stand together — " You hold your empire as a 
tyranny." 

Thucydides nowhere says that he is opposed to the Athenian 
Empire — ^he very rarely expresses any moral judgment, so 
rarely that some critics hold to-day that he never made any ; 
but it is impossible to read Cleon on Mitylene, or to follow 
the discussion between the Athenian and the Melian delegates, 
without a surge of feeling within oneself. Is it conceivable 
that a man could write them stony-hearted as some critics 
suggest ? It is not thinkable. 

" As for the gods, we expect to have quite as much of 
their favour as you," say the Athenians ; " for we are not 
doing or claiming anything which goes beyond common 
opinion about divine or men's desires about human things. 
For of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a 
law of their nature wherever they can rule they will. This 
law was not made by us, and we are not the first who have 
acted upon it ; we did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it 
to all time, and we know that you and all mankind, if you 
were as strong as we are, would do as we do. So much for 
the gods ; we have told you w^hy we expect to stand as high 
in their good opinion as you." ^ 

There are points here which must be reserved for a later 
moment, but for the present we may remark that no access 
to the cynicism of the speaker seems possible. Whether he 
actually said so much, or whether Thucydides interpreted him 
so, he represented the temper of the imperial people. " The 
place was closely invested, and there was treachery among the 
citizens themselves. So the Melians were induced to surrender 
at discretion. The Athenians thereupon put to death all who 
were of military age, and made slaves of the women and 
children. They then colonized the island, sending thither five 
hundred settlers of their own." And in the next sentences 
we learn that the Athenians, after conquering Melos, conceived 
the hope and the desire of conquering Sicily ; and the story 
moves on to the Sicilian expedition. 

It is remarked that Thucydides offers no comment on the 
right or wrong of such an action, nor again in the earlier 
passage where the Plataeans plead for life before the stony- 
1 Thuc. V. 105 (Jowett's translation). 



76 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

faced Spartans who will put them to death whatever they say. 
The Spartans of course made no speech about it. It is the 
way men act and have acted from before Agamemnon down 
to our own day. God, hope, humanity, right and wrong — 
all irrelevant ; Odysseus acted so in Euripides' play ^ and 
had no bad end. Callicles talks so in the Gorgias and talks 
sense, for Socrates did come to the hemlock. Diodotus, 
whoever he was, who makes the speech against Cleon's demand 
to treat the Mitylenaeans in the same way, drags in neither 
gods nor justice ; the argument for mercy to beaten subjects 
or victims is expediency. 

On the other side we have one or two things to set. When 
the Thracians, the neighbours of the historian, dashed into 
Mycalessos, ** they cut down all whom they met — women, 
children, beasts of burden, every living thing they saw. For 
the Thracians, when they dare, can be as bloody as the worst 
barbarians. There in Mycalessos . . . they even fell upon 
a boys' school, the largest in the place, which the children had 
just entered, and massacred them every one. . . . Considering 
the size of the city, no calamity more deplorable occurred 
during the war." 2 After all it was not very unlike Melos, 
but for the suddenness. This is perhaps the nearest the 
historian comes to a judgment on any such acts, unless the 
description of stasis at Corcyra contain some more personal 
feeling. Yet it is not merely that a modern reader feels some- 
how that a great historian cannot be quite callous ; there is 
surely evidence as to his own mind in the pleas of the victims. 
A man who really had no moral feeling about the methods of 
Athenian imperialism could never have produced such effects 
upon the human spirit — ^he would not have lingered over 
such matters, he would have taken them as a matter of 
course, he would not have called attention to them and 
brought out their hatefulness.^ Ancient critics understood 
him better than some of us to-day ; they recognized his 
extraordinary pov/ers of pathos, his gift for appeal to feeling, 
and, if Dionysius' notion that he wished to rouse ill-will against 

1 See Chapter V. p. 159. ^ Thuc. vii. 29, 30. 

^ See Girard, Thucydide, pp. 234-238 : " L'idee du droit se degage 
toute seule du spectacle des faits, de la lutte des passions qui les pro- 
duisent, des debats contradictoires auxquels ils donnent lieu." 



THUCYDIDES ^^ 

his country, to vent malice on her, is absurd, it still bears witness 
to the fact that Thucydides does bring out the hateful wrong 
that Athens did to mankind for the sake of empire. That 
he does it with a wonderful reserve is a matter to which we 
must return. 

Meanwhile Thucydides makes it clear to those who can 
feel — not of course to others, for there is no evidence that he 
looked for a Thracian public — that he did not approve of the 
imperialism of Cleon and Alcibiades — nor of Pericles, after all. 
Yet he shows fairly enough how the empire itself arose out of 
service done. The ** Athenians " who happened to be at 
Sparta tell the story of how the Spartans refused to lead 
Greece against Persia, and '* out of the work itself we were 
compelled " ^ to take the vacant leadership. That is true, 
and it was necessary, as history shows by the time we reach 
Antalkidas. The same language is held by Euphemos at 
Camarina,2 but he has a tinge of a later day, which suggests 
that the Imperialism of 416 was not quite the national 
patriotism of 479. 

So much for Imperial Democracy abroad, and we have 
seen that he does not admire its leaders at home. That from 
time to time he drops such a phrase as this — '' as a crowd 
wiir* ^ — proves little. Even the most convinced Democrats 
recognize that a sovereign people can make mistakes, and 
bad ones. Herodotus * and Abraham Lincoln agree that 
*' you can fool all the people some of the time." If we are to 
talk of ideal constitutions or governments in a world, where 
they seem never to have existed or never to have been re- 
cognized by those who lived under them, and to ask what was 
the historian's ideal, Thucydides makes it plain that he did 
not admire tyranny or monarchy — the tyrants were small in 
outlook and kept Greece paralysed ; ^ and his description of the 
oligarchy of the Four Hundred in Athens brings out forcibly 
how oppressive and how impossible it was. It succeeded just 

^ Thuc. i. 75, 3. 2 Thuc. vi. 82. ^-^^ 

^ e.g. in the case of Pericles, ii. 65, 14 ; cf. iv. 28, 3 ; vi. 6-^^^ 2 ; 
viii. I, 4. See the very interesting and suggestive section in Lamb, 
Clio Enthroned, ch. iii, § 3. 

* Herodotus, v. 97, ttoXXovs ya^ oIkc elvai cvTrcria-Tepov dia^dWeiv rj eva. 

^ Thuc. i. 17. 



7% FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

so long as nobody quite knew what it was, or whether he was 
safe with his neighbour ; but it fell as soon as men saw it would 
use the sword on the citizens and make surrender to the nation's 
enemy. No, democracy was the only stable government that 
Athens could have. 

All the same — we may call it doctrinaire or pedantic — he 
shows a weakness for a moderate democracy, which is interest- 
ing. Mr. R. A. Neil has discussed the political use in Greece 
of moral terms.^ Sco<f>p(ov is one of them, with the verb 
and the noun derived from it. " Moral sense in politics " 
marked Sparta and Chios, and prosperity along with it.^ 
Pindar in a more lyric way had said the same of Corinth two 
generations before — " There abides the spirit of law (Evvofjula) 
and her sister, Justice, sure foundation of cities, and Peace, 
one at heart with them, stewards of wealth for men, golden 
daughters of Themis of good counsel," ^ The poet meant 
oligarchy more or less. The historian describes the move- 
ment in Athens, out of which the Four Hundred came, as 
one toward " good order " (evTaKTetv) ; and, later on, in a 
terribly involved sentence, which Dionysius picked out as an 
example of his tricks with grammar, * he tells us that once the 
subject cities received " moral sense " and freedom of action 
— i.e. had oligarchies set up in them by Pisander — they pre- 
ferred " straight freedom " {ttjv avriKpv^ eXevOepiav) to the 
" skin-deep good order " of Athens (t^9 airo tcov 'AOrjvaicov 
vTTovXov evvofjiiafi ^). However, oligarchy was not to be in 
Athens, and recourse was had to another scheme, something 
in the direction or after the style of the Five Thousand who 
had so far existed in talk only. What exactly this constitu- 
tion was, he does not say, but he does say that *' during its 
early days it was the best constitution which the Athenians 
ever enjoyed within my memory. Oligarchy and Democracy 
were duly attempered. And thus after the miserable state 
into which she had fallen, the city was again able to raise 

^ Appendix to his edition of the Knights. 

2 Thuc. viii. 24, 4. ^ Pindar, Olympian, 13, i-io. 

* Dionysius, Letter to Ammaeus, p. 800: evvofiias, he says, would 
in an ordinary author have been accusative. The MSS., Jowett says, 
read aiWovofxias, and he suggests Dionysius may have made a slip of 
memory, which does not seem probable. 

6 Thuc. viii. 64, 5. 



THUCYDIDES 79 

her head.'* ^ Whatever it was, this " constitution of Thera- 
menes * ' did not last beyond a few months. It is only interesting 
in two ways — first, that it could not maintain itself as a sub- 
stitute for real Democracy, and secondly, that even so it won 
the praise of Thucydides who in this marked way prefers it 
to the rule of Pericles himself — though perhaps he would add, 
if we could ask him, that he only meant that it was preferable 
on paper. He would hardly " seek something different, so 
to say, from the conditions under which we live " ; but perhaps 
there is a streak of the doctrinaire in every reflective student 
of politics, especially in those who are not actually engaged 
in them. Real constitutions are never quite ideal ; like our 
clothes they keep wearing out, and wear out unevenly, and it 
is best for a people when its constitution will admit of half- 
conscious adjustment, instinctive accommodation to new 
circumstances, when it is something like that flux which 
Heraclitus saw in all human and other affairs. 

But constitutions, actual or projected, do not sum up the 
life of a people, and it was not because of a constitution that 
Thucydides was interested in Athens. We may waive — 
though we ought not to forget — the natural human ties of 
home, and friendship, and association. The Athenian character 
interested the Athenian citizen — it was so quick, so penetrative, 
so engaging, so full of life and fire and imagination. The 
Corinthian speaker addressing the Spartans contrasts the two 
national temperaments : they are quick to conceive the plan 
and quick to carry it out — you originate nothing ; they will 
take risks of the most reckless (yes, but, says Pericles elsewhere, 
they calculate those risks in cold blood and then face them 
light-heartedly) — you are strong, but act feebly ; they are 
impetuous — you dilatory ; they are always abroad, and you 
for ever at home ; in a word, they were born neither to have 
peace themselves, nor to allow other men to have it either.^ 
The pair of portraits is admirable — better than any Corinthian 
ever offered to Peloponnesian allies at Sparta. 

The other side is given in a speech made by an Athenian 

at Athens. " We forget that a state in which the laws, though 

imperfect, are unalterable, is better off than one in which the 

laws are good but powerless. Dulness and modesty {dfiaOla 

1 Thuc. viii. 97. 2 xhuc. i. 70. 



8o FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

fxera a-ay^poavvr)^) are a more useful combination than 
cleverness and licence ; and the more simple sort generally 
make better citizens than the more acute (^vvercoripov^;), for 
the latter desire to be thought wiser than the laws . . . and 
their folly generally ends in the ruin of their country. ... In 
such rhetorical contests the city gives away the prizes to others 
while she takes the risk upon herself . . . . You go to a discussion 
as spectators, and take your facts on hearsay — the easiest 
dupes of new-fangled arguments, the slaves of every new 
paradox, you despise what is familiar." ^ The speaker really 
has a good case, and he gets a lot of support. King Archidamus 
in the same vein sounds the praise of Sparta, " because we 
are not so highly educated as to have learnt to despise the 
laws.'* ^ Aristophanes later on makes Aeschylus complain 
in The Frogs of the effect of this Athenian habit of mind, whose 
high priest was Euripides : 

The disorder has spread to the fleet and the crew ; 

The service is ruined and ruined by you — 

With prate and debate in a mutinous state ; 

Whereas in my day 'twas a different way ; 

Nothing they said and knew nothing to say, 

But to call for their porridge, and cry, " Pull away." ' 

What Plato has to say of '* the democratic man " we shall see 
later on.* The same thought reappears for ever. J. A. Froude 
in our own day has it. " John Mill called English Conserva- 
tives the stupid party. Well, stupidity in its place is not 
always a bad thing. I have a high respect for Conserva- 
tism.^ . . . Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine are 
generally nonsense." ® So Cleon has after all a good many 
highly respectable people to siTpport the ideas, from which he 
proceeds to plead for the massacre of the Mityienaeans. 

But what does Thucydides mean by it all ? In the Funeral 
Speech, which Pericles delivers over those fallen in the first 
year of the war, there is a glowing eulogy of Athenian character 
and of that essential freedom of all Athenian ways which gives 
the individual an unexampled charter to think, to speak, and 

1 Thuc. iii. $7, sS, with some omissions and compressions. 

2 Thuc. i. 84. ^ Aristophanes, Frogs, 1070 (Frere). 

* See Chapter IX. p. 298. ^ ^A^iadia fiera (ra>(f>po(Tvvris, no doubt. 

• Erasmus, lect. viii. p. 147. 



THUCYDIDES 8i 

to act as his own inmost nature prompts, and as the world in 
its variety and its wonder calls. " We have a peculiar power 
of thinking before we act, and of acting too, whereas other men 
arecourageous from ignorance,but hesitate upon reflection.^ . . . 
To sum up, I say that Athens is the education of Greece, and 
that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have 
the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of 
action with the utmost versatility and grace." ^ Once again, 
there is a certain dim correspondence between the utterances 
of Pericles and Cleon ; they are describing the same tempera- 
ment. The strength and the weakness of a human character 
spring in general from the same root. The Athenian had in 
truth the gifts and graces that Pericles extols, and was in conse- 
quence exposed to the criticism of Cleon, just as the artistic 
temperament with all its charm and insight is, in our common 
experience, a fatal endowment unless it is reinforced with the 
shopkeeper virtues of ordinary sense and industry and punctu- 
ality — virtues which, by the way, the Athenian never credited 
to shopkeeper or tradesman. Mr. Zimmern speaks of Thucy- 
dides' " usual gentle irony playing round the confident sentences 
in which Pericles glorifies the Athenian amateur." ^ That same 
irony surely played round the speech of Cleon — what a censor 
of Athenian character, this man who represented Athenian 
impressionism at its worst, who traded on it, and who led 
Athens into the path of ruin, setting the pace for his posterity 
of impressionist and impulsive ignorance ! 

Once again we have reached one of the deepest things in 
Thucydides' own character — his subtle power of combining 
depth of feeling with clearness of insight and controlling it with 
a self-restraint almost unexampled in literature. He analyses 
the national mind ; nothing escapes him ; it is all set down 
with relentless precision — casual readers, yes, and careful 
readers have again remarked on his coldness, his detachment, 
the clear, keen intellect unclouded by likes and dislikes, by 
feelings or sympathies, and they have admired or disliked it. 
They are wrong. Thucydides is greater than they think. 

1 Thuc. ii. 40, 3 (Jowett). 2 xhuc. ii. 41, i (Jowett). 

3 Greek Commonwealth, p. 293. Professor Bury also speaks of -- a 
certain veiled irony " here, but he, I think, is sometimes a shade too 
apt to find irony. 
6 



82 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

The warm sympathies are there. Passion, admiration, intensity 
of feehng are not inconsistent in the greatest natures with 
insight and truth and restraint ; they work together, and it is 
their co-operation that makes the strange greatness of the 
man. He loves Athens, but that does not stay his hand nor 
shake his touch. He says no word to safeguard a Dionysius 
from supposing him resentful and angry ; if a man cannot 
read what burns on every page, if he cannot see w^hat is not in 
ink, nor in mere written words — then he can read the book 
and opine what he pleases. It was not written for him — 
(ftcovdvTa (Tvv6Tota-iv. And if he asks evidence for what is said 
here, let him explain why it is impossible to read the story and 
not be passionately for Athens — x\thens right or wrong ; how 
is it that the Seventh Book takes one into the same region of 
feeling and suffering that Euripides does with his Trojan 
Women, and yet the Athenians are in the wrong throughout 
the whole of the Sicilian expedition ? 

" Others, who saw their ships worsted, cried and shrieked 
aloud, and were by the sight alone more utterly unnerved than 
the defeated combatants themselves. Others again, who had 
fixed their gaze on some part of the struggle which was un- 
decided, were in a state of excitement still more terrible ; they 
kept swaying their bodies to and fro in an agony of hope and fear 
as the stubborn conflict went on and on ; for at every instant 
they were all but saved or all but lost. And while the strife 
hung in the balance you might hear in the Athenian army at 
once lamentation, shouting, cries of victory or defeat, and all 
the various sounds which are wrung from a great host in 
extremity of danger. Not less agonizing were the feelings of 
those on board. At length the Syracusans and their 
allies . . /' 1 

It is of this Seventh Book that Plutarch speaks when he 
refers to " those narratives in which Thucydides, excelling even 
himself in pathos, in vividness, and in variety, has told his 
story in a way that defies imitation." ^ What has given him 
this power ? Why could not a Timaeus do it for all his tr5dng, 
as Plutarch half asks ? It was the supreme struggle of Thucy- 
dides* country with life and death as the issue — and she lost. 
It took ten more years of protracted misery to finish her, but 

^ Thuc. vii. 71 (Jowett). 2 pj^t. Nicias, i. 



THUCYDIDES 83 

the day in the harbour of Sjnracuse was her ruin — and the man 
felt it and has made every reader feel it. Athens fell, and when 
Thucydides wrote the great Epitaphios of Pericles, it was 
not merely a funeral speech over the dead of the first year, but 
a last great eulogy over a fallen people. It has been compared 
with the speech of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg — a shorter 
speech, spoken while the Civil War still continued, by the 
chief of a great nation, which " under God " had " a new birth 
of freedom." The comparison is a just one ; there is the same 
note in both speeches. Lincoln saw his country triumph ; not 
so Thucydides : 

Infelix ! utcunque f event ea facta nepotes, 

Vincet amor patriae. 

We now come to the actual book he wrote, and we must for 
the present try to use it neither as a source from which to learn 
events, nor as an objective thing in itself — if there is such a 
thing — but to study it as the organic offspring of a great nature, 
an integer, an artistic whole, and to proceed from a recognition 
of its salient points to the study of the mind and heart that 
produced it. 

The first thing that stands out is, that Thucydides from the 
very start foresaw that the war would be above all others 
significant for the Greek world and so for mankind. He 
*' began at once on its commencement '* ; ^ he " lived through 
the whole of it," 2 and he *' has written it, everything in order 
as it occurred, by summers and winters, till the Lacedaemonians 
and their allies ended the empire of the Athenians and took the 
Long Walls and the Peiraieus. In all, the war lasted twenty- 
seven years." ^ And he adds that the Peace of Nicias, as 
posterity called it, did not really produce a state of peace ; 
before it and after it the war was one war. Modern critics 
have battled as to the point at which he realized this himself — 
did he compose an *' Archidamian War " down to that Peace of 
Nicias, and then write a " Sjnracusan Expedition " as a separate 
and independent work, and eventually unite the two histories 
by the slight structure of the Fifth Book, and continue with the 
Eighth — a third scheme ? Historians have done such things — 
Clarendon, for instance — but there are difficulties in supposing 
that Thucydides did. Is not his prelude in book i. rather 

1 Thuc. i. I, I. 2 Thuc. v. 26, 5. » Thuc. v. 26, i. 



84 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

too large and significant for a war ending so inconclusively 
as that supposed to end with the Peace of Nicias ? Do not 
his whole treatment of the war-issues in book i., and his 
judgment on Pericles as contrasted with his successors in 
book ii., imply the full and final war of twenty-seven years ? 
, Was there interval enough for " The Syracusan Expedition *' 
to be written (and published ?) after research on the actual 
spot before it was clear that the original Peloponnesian War 
was in full course again ? Does the whole work really show 
signs of a reconstruction of plan ? ^ In any case, we have to 
allow fundamental revision on the basis of the conception of 
one war. 

That he kept a diary, made collections, interviewed and 
cross-examined witnesses, and visited such scenes of action 
as were important and were accessible, is clear. Indeed, he 
says as much : '* Of the events of the war I have not ventured 
to speak from any chance information, nor according to any 
notion of my ovm ; I have described nothing but what I either 
saw myself or learned from others of whom I made the most 
careful and particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one, 
because eye-witnesses of the same occurrences gave different 
accounts of them, as they remembered or were interested in the 
actions of one side or the other.'* ^ It is easy to suggest that 
it was this long investigation that brought home to Thucydides 
the carelessness of men in general as to fact, and their readiness 
to accept whatever comes first to hand.^ His tone is severe, 
and he means it to be severe ; why should men be so inaccurate ? 
One recalls Dr. Johnson's vexation with the poor lady who 
never, when he tried to examine her, would be categorical, but 
was always " wiggle-waggle." So careful was Thucydides 
of fact that a German scholar has collected a long list of the 
places where he says he was unable to learn.* In one place he 
refrains from giving a figure, for *' it would seem incredible 
when compared with the size of the city." ^ Some eleven 
times he gives what he was told, with the caution that it is 

1 The emphasis on oSe 6 TroXe/ios, used sometimes of the Archidamian, 
at other times of the whole war, is overdone. The critics seem to forget 
how easily phrases slip out. 

2 Thuc. i. 22 (Jowett). ^ Thuc. i. 20. 

* Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii. 653. ^ Thuc. iii. 113, 6. 



THUCYDIDES 85 

only what he was told. His exactitude as to numbers is re- 
marked — they are not like those of the rhetorical historians ; 
in large figures he gives thousands and hundreds only — units 
only in the case of Athens or where exact knowledge was 
possible.! His care as to chronology marks an epoch in the 
writing of history. Eclipses and earthquakes are carefully 
noted ; men date by them so much.^ The war began in the 
fifteenth year of the Thirty Years* Peace, " when Chrysis the 
high-priestess of Argos was in the forty-eighth year of her 
priesthood, Aenesias being ephor at Sparta, and at Athens 
Pythodorus having two months of his archonship to run.'* ^ 
He expected that his history would not please — it would be too 
exact and bare ; * and his expectation was right. Dionysius 
complains that he is '* obscure and hard to follow. Many events, 
of course, occur in the same summer or winter in different 
places, and he leaves the first set of affairs half done and takes 
another set in hand. It is only natural that we flounder, and 
follow the story with some annoyance, when our attention is 
distracted in this way." ^ There is truth in the complaint ; 
the story of events in outlying regions is very hard to follow ; 
but anyone who has worked with the Hellenica of Xenophon ® 
(if one may criticize an old friend) will be grateful for the 
rigid scheme to which Thucydides sticks so grimly and con- 
scientiously. The ideal of to aKpi^h involves sacrifices for 
both writer and reader, but it repays them. 

In all this Thucydides has a definite and avowed purpose. 
" If he who desires to have before his eyes a true picture of 
the events which have happened (rwz^ re fyevo/niveov to o-ac^e? 
aKoireXv), and of the like events which may be expected to 
happen hereafter in the order of human things, shall pronounce 
what I have written to be useful, then I shall be satisfied. 
My history is written as a possession for ever, rather than as a 
prize-performance to hear for the moment." ' In other words 

^ Peter, Wahrheitu. Kunst, 117. 

^ Cf. Thuc. i. 128, Tov fieyav (reio-fiov. 

'^ Thuc. ii. 2. * Thuc. i. 22, 4. ^ Letter to Pompeius, p. 77^. 

" A year gets mislaid somehow between 411 and 406 ; did Alcibiades 
return to Athens in 408 or 407 ? A good deal turns on it. 

' Thuc. i. 22. Is there not just a hint of the didactic, or even of the 
pedantic, in the claim — as also, e.g., in his diction, and his corrections 
of Herodotus ? 



86 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

he is writing, as we might say in the language of to-day, for 
men who take history seriously, not as a pastime or something 
vaguely interesting, but as a rendering of fact and experience 
that shall illuminate human nature. History is not for 
Thucydides, as Aristotle contemptuously suggested, " just what 
Alcibiades did '* ; ^ Alcibiades had a deeper significance — 
what he was went to shape the whole mind of Athens to great 
issues, and any Hellene who wishes to understand the world 
in which he lives must understand the mind of Athens in the 
war-time, and Alcibiades supplies perhaps more than one key 
to that. But if Alcibiades is to give the reader a clue and not 
merely to delay or distract him, there must be some thought- 
out principle in the presentation; and that brings us to the 
method of Thucydides. 

We have seen how exigent his conscience was as to fact ; 
but facts do not make a history. However scientific a 
historian may aim at being, or may plume himself on being, 
he is amenable to other canons than those of the man of science. 
He comes closer to the human mind, and his task is (in a sense) 
to introduce mind to mind. He must know his " period " 
(as we call it) and know it intimately, if he is to interpret it to 
another ; but he must not do it in a mere series of generaliza- 
tions, for that leads at once to error and to vagueness. He 
has after all to present men and women to his readers, and 
in action, thinking, speaking, doing things, influencing one 
another ; and this means other faculties than those of scientific 
research. He must in a word be an artist — he must emphasize, 
omit, combine, he must speak at once to mind and heart, to 
intellect and feeling. These are the first conditions of literary 
presentment, if he is to make history effective for the purposes 
set before him. If he is content to be an annalist, to accumu- 
late detail, or if he prefers to leave all in the workshop, it is 
another matter. Every faculty that makes literature must 
be his, if his work is to live ; and if it does not live it will not 
avail much for any purpose. 

Limitation is his first law. A German critic has remarked 
that Thucydides is great in omission ; ^ and he is. There is 
no end to the omissions ; the things are numberless that he 

^ Aristotle, Poetics, 9, 145 1 h. 

^ Miiller-Strubing — -- gross im Verschweigen." 



THUCYDIDES ^'j 

could have told us, that we should have liked to know, that 
we might have expected him to tell us. Greek art he passes 
by — trade, commerce, adventure, exploration, poetry, philo- 
sophy. Who would guess from his pages that any day he 
. heard Pericles speak, he might have met Sophocles in the street, 
and Euripides and Socrates and Pheidias ? — yes, and Aristo- 
phanes still a mere lad might have passed him too. It is 
perfectly clear that they all had their share of influence upon 
him,^ but he does not allude to contemporary literature .2 
Homer, the Homeric hymns, Hesiod, he mentions, but not 
his fellow-citizens. He omits finance — even that reassessment 
of the tribute, rediscovered by moderns in inscriptions, which 
bulks so big for economic students of history. ^ Mr. Bury 
is probably right in saying that *' economic factors did not 
play anything like the same part in the ancient world, and, 
if ancient historians considerably underrated them, we may 
easily fall into the error of overrating them." * Thucydides 
ignores all sorts of things that interest us ; he simplifies, as 
M. Girard says, with a hardihood unmatched. ^ For one 
thing he is writing the history of a war, not of a race, nor of 
a city. It is also true that while he omits certain aspects of 
Athenian life, which are deeply interesting to us, now and 
again, as in Pericles* Funeral Speech, it is clear to those familiar 
with them that he is glancing at art and literature. But he 
does it with a purpose of his own. 

The same canon of limitation applies, as we have seen, to 
the human factors in the war. Hyperbolus, we saw, is only 
mentioned because his murder was a sort of manifesto. Cleon 
was a decisive influence in the war ; so he is drawn with care 
and precision — and perhaps with the one hint of personal 
feeling in the eight books : '' The Athenians laughed at his 
light talk ; but serious people (men of common sense, roh 

^ Cf. the statement of Mr. B. B. Rogers, translation of Acharnians, 
pp. xxx-xxxii : " I believe many statements in Thucydides are due to 
his recollection of the comedies of Aristophanes." See also Lamb, 
Clio Enthroned, pp. 26-28, for attractive suggestions as to the influence 
of poetry upon Thucydides. 

^The Atthis of Hellanicos (i. 97) is an exception which makes the 
statement above more striking. 

3 Hicks and Hill, Greek Inscr., No. 64. 

* Ancient Greek Historians, p. 92. * Thucydide, p. 204. 



88 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

aax^poai,) were not displeased, for they reckoned that they 
would get one or other of two advantages — they would either 
be rid of Cleon, which they rather hoped, or, if they were 
mistaken in their expectations, they would take the Spartans 
prisoners." ^ It looks like personal feeling ; and yet it is 
history. Men did hope to be rid of Cleon, and for a perfectly 
serious and good reason, as appeared when he fell at Amphipolis ; 
he was the real obstacle to peace. When the obstacle was 
removed, peace was made. Then we can understand the 
aot)(j>pov€(; ; and we shall have to understand Cleon— obviously ; 
so Thucydides draws him in his own way, lets him make a 
speech, and gives us the full value of his maniac boast and the 
success that made common people think him infallible and 
invincible. In a similar way, Alcibiades' chariots and horses 
and luxury and general expensiveness, his blatant self-assertion, 
and some touches even of his phrase, are set out in full in the 
history. There were other sumptuous and magnificent young 
men in Athens, as Aristophanes and others let us see, but they 
did not matter. Alcibiades did matter — only too much. " In 
the end his wild courses went far to ruin the Athenian state. 
For the people feared the extremes to which he carried his 
lawless self-indulgence, and the far-reaching purposes which 
animated him in all his actions. They thought he was aiming 
at a tyranny, and set themselves against him. And therefore, 
although his talents as a military commander were unrivalled, 
they entrusted the administration of the war to others, because 
they personally objected to his private life ; and so they 
speedily shipwrecked the state." ^ go in the case of Pericles, 
long as he waits before he mentions him, the historian lingers 
over him, and lets us feel the full effect exerted upon his fellow- 
citizens by this great personality. Here was a man — not 
quite perhaps of Thucydides' own party — who could have 
saved the state ; at least, men felt it would have been saved, 
if they had not in folly abandoned the principles he laid 
down for the conduct of the war. The forceful personality 
is always a real factor — real as the great plague, or the 
Syracusan disaster, or the Persian alliance. So far Thucy- 

1 Thuc. iv. 28, 5. 

2Thuc. vi. 15 (Jowett). Of. Xen. Hellenica, i. 4, 12-5, 16; Plut. 
Alcib. 34. 



THUCYDIDES 89 

dides may be cited to support Carlyle's doctrine of the 
Hero. 

The remark is often made that Thucydides offers no moral 
judgments on men or actions — a remark which we have aheady 
discussed — but all his praise, or comment, turns on capacity, 
aperr), virtu, as Professor Bury and Professor Murray translate 
him. ^vaem 1(txv<! — " strength of nature " — the forceful 
character — the gift or gifts in virtue of which a man may 
move men or read a situation, in a word, may really " do '* 
something — this endowment, whatever it is, Thucydides 
emphasizes, for it makes a man a telling factor. Cleon had it, 
violent and absurd as he was — so had Pericles and Antiphon 
— above all, Themistocles.^ Here " was a man whose natural 
force (</)uo-€ft)9 l(^x^) was unmistakable ; this was the 
quality for which he was distinguished above other men ; 
from his own native acuteness [oiicela yap ^vveaet), and with- 
out study either before or at the time, he was the ablest judge 
(KpcLTioTTOf; yvcoficov) of the course to be pursued in a 
sudden emergency, and could best divine what was likely to 
happen in the remotest future. ... In a word, Themistocles, 
by natural power of mind ((^uo-ew? fiev BwdfieL) and with the 
least preparation, was of all men the best able to extemporize 
the right thing to be done." Xenophon's heroes, like Xeno- 
phon himself, turn to soothsayer and priest for omens and 
divine guidance. Thucydides is aware that men do so — that 
they do it a great deal ; ^ yet history is made by the men with 
force of mind ; and he confines himself, in dealing with men, to 
that. His readers will be put in possession of the facts, and 
shall judge of moral questions for themselves. 

Mr. Cornford notices that Thucydides has nothing to do 
with such conceptions as '* political factors," " relations of 
forces," ** universal forces," and so on, and suggests that 
their importation into modern study has not been all to the 
good. The use of abstract nouns in history is something we 
apparently owe to political science. The abstract nouns of 

^ Thuc. i. 138, 3 (Jowett). The antithetic coupling of superlatives 
is a characteristic mannerism. Cf. Forbes, Thuc. bk. i. Intr. p. xxiii, 
who gives a series of striking instances of " greatest " events, etc. 

2 Cf . Mr. Lamb's remark on the weak spot in Nicias* character, 
TO) TOLovTcoj Thuc. vli. $0, 4 {Clio Enthroned, p. 75). 



90 ^ FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Thucydides would make a poor and rather odd list for a 
modern^ — many of them would be neuter participles with 
the article prefixed. But we must not quite class him with 
Carlyle in the matter of heroes — despite the strong likeness 
between the *' hero " and the " man of natural force." There 
are, as we all know, in national and international questions, 
floating ideas put about no one knows how, alarms as to what 
may happen, opinions as to courses to pursue — drift-thought 
that tells in the long run, which a historian cannot well 
neglect, for it goes very often to shape a national resolve or 
leads the way to some great change. There was " talk of a 
dictatorship " in Rome for a good while before Caesar became 
the world's master. Now gather up the vague " political 
factors," current impressions, impulses, calculations, and there 
is an aggregate of contributions to every political situation, 
which has to be represented, if the reader is really to be in 
possession of what he needs. A modern historian manages it 
by discussion, fortified by the quotation of popular catchwords 
and watchwords, phrases from the speeches, dispatches, news- 
paper articles, census reports, stock exchange news, letters, 
biographies, and so forth, of the day ; and if he does it well, 
he can carry his reader far into the life and thought of the 
period and the moment. It is obvious that an ancient 
historian had none of these paper aids, and yet the life that 
pulses through them to-day was not wanting then. He could 
not very well quote what did not exist, and yet he had to do 
something equivalent. Thucydides cut the knot by writing 
speeches himself, in which he set out the considerations and 
factors which would come into play at each significant juncture. 
In the same chapter,^ already quoted, in which he tells us of 
his care to see, to learn, and to examine witnesses in order to 
be sure as to what really occurred, he tells us as explicitly 
that the speeches stand on another footing altogether. 

"As to the speeches which were made either before or 
during the war, it was hard for me, and for others who reported 
them to me, to recollect the exact words. I have therefore 

^ Dionysius, in the Letter to Ammaeus, has some interesting observa- 
tions on his pecuUar tricks with nouns and genders, e.g. vi. 24, t6 ^ov\6- 

fl€VOV for TTjV ^OvXrj<TlV. 

"Thuc. i. 22, I. 



THUCYDIDES 91 

put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to 
the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to express 
them, while at the same time I endeavoured, as nearly as I could, 
to give the general purport of what was actually said." 

Nothing could be more explicit. The method has the 
advantage of enabling him to simplify — he can sweep away 
irrelevant and trifling figures and keep his stage clear for the 
people who really matter. It allows him to touch the real 
place of speech in Greek life, while his readers escape the 
irrelevant floods of Athenian loquacity. He " speaks things," 
as Cromwell said. His speeches represent real factors, real 
issues, the reflections that would really occur to thoughtful 
men. The method again allows him to give a situation or a 
national character from more points of view than one,^ and 
to do it all while he keeps himself and his own opinions in 
the background. Of course he is not really absent from the 
speaker's bema on any occasion, nor is the modern historian 
with his woof and web of quotations and impressions ; but 
the device of Thucydides takes us, or seems to take us — it is 
psychologically for us much the same thing — right into the 
actual scene. Imagination — in Coleridge's sense of the word 
— is an essential in the writing or reading of history, and 
Thucydides' method of using the speech is a stimulus to 
imagination, not less effective for being an unobtrusive 
stimulus. Here it is plain that the historian learnt some of 
his craft from the tragic poet. 

Modem critics have tried to classify the speeches in different 
ways. Mr. Grundy draws a line at the exile, and groups the 
earlier speeches as those which Thucydides may have heard, 
and those which he probably or almost certainly did not hear ; 
while of the speeches after the exile, unless he heard Alcibiades 
at Sparta, it is practically certain he heard none whatever.^ 
Mr. Cornford has another grouping, which is suggestive.^ 
There are realistic speeches, he says, like that of the ephor ; * 

1 Thus there are three pictures of the Spartan character in bk, i., 
in three speeches, cc. 71, 80, 86. 

2 Grundy, Thucydides and his Age, p. 19. 

^ Thucydides Mythistoricus, p. 149 f. See also Lamb, Clio Enthroned, 
p. 183. 

* Thuc. i. S6. One might add vi. 18. 3, where the schoUast re- 
marks it is fcar 'A\Ki^id8r)v — in his vein. 



92 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

idealistic, the great Funeral Oration above all ; a 
which sketches of national character are introduced indirectly," 
like the Corinthian's picture of the Athenian nature, " with 
some strain upon dramatic probability," shading off into a 
class " where irony is openly employed in the tragic manner " 
— e.g. the Mitylenaean speech of Cleon ; and lastly a group 
" still further removed from realism," and virtually " but one 
degree below the lyric plane " — of which the Spartan speech 
as to Pylos and luck is an example. Such groupings have 
their value ; but the main thing is to keep the mind clear as 
to the historian's purpose, by a medium avowedly artificial, 
to bring the reader to grips with what is undoubtedly real. 
Mr. Cornford would say it was not real, but Thucydides clearly 
believed that it was. The speeches were perhaps not made at 
all — Busolt holds, however, that every one of them rests on 
some foundation of a speech actually delivered ; ^ — everybody 
agrees that they could not have been given in the form in 
which we have them, for the Spartan speeches, for instance, 
are far outside the Spartan range, and in any case no con- 
ceivable popular audience would have listened to speakers 
so involved and obscure,^ as Thucydides, ex-politician, must 
have known at least as well as we do. Yet Eduard Meyer hits 
the mark when he calls them *' den eigentlichen Lebensnerv " 
of his work.3 Perhaps with some hesitation as to the super- 
lative adjective (if conscience works with memory *) one might 
sum the matter up by borrowing the lines of Critias on another 
great inventor : 

— TovaBe Tovs \6yovs Xeyav 
bidayfidrcDV ^dicrTov elarrjy^craTO 
^evdel KaXvyjras rrjv a.\r}deiav \6yay.^ 

1 Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii. p. 672. 

2 Let the reader just think for a moment of Phormio's speech to his 
sailors. 

3 E. Meyer, Forsch. ii. p. 380. 

* Some readers may be glad to know that Cratippus, his contem- 
porary, 6 crvuaKfxdcras avra koI to. TrapaKeKpdeura vtt" avrov aw ay ay av 
(whatever that exactly means), wrote, ov fxovov rals irpd^ecnv alras (viz. 
the speeches) ifXTrodayv yeyevija-dai Xeyav, dWa rols aKovova-iv ox^rjpas eival. 
Cratippus added that Thucydides realized this himself, and that that is 
why there are no speeches in bk. viii. So Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 
de Thucydide, ch. 16, p. 847. 

^ Ap. Sext. Empir. adv. Math, ix. 54. 



THUCYDIDES 93 

It has long been observed what an influence Tragedy had 
upon Thucydides. Indeed, again and again it is hard not to 
use the terms of Tragedy in discussing his work. Like the tragic 
poet he refrains from comment and lets the situation draw out 
the comment for itself. Xenophon is more Homeric — vi^irio^, 
cries Homer of this man and the other, and Xenophon pauses 
to remark, for instance, on the shocking impiety in the Corin- 
thian revolution.^ Mr. Cornford, however, suggests that, con- 
sciously borrowing the outward form of Tragedy, Thucydides 
took unconsciously the further step, and fell in with its inward 
form and principle of design — that, in short, he wrote his 
history " to the tune of " Aeschylus' Agamemnon.^ With 
amazing ingenuity he traces an analogy as far as the end of 
book vii. — luck, hybris, peripeteia, and all ; and then comes 
the Eighth Book, which is ** outside the tragedy " somewhat. 
'' From this point onwards," says Mr. Cornford, " he has 
little interest in his task ; the Eighth Book is a mere continua- 
tion on the old chronological plan, unfinished, dull, and spirit- 
less. The historian patiently continued his record ; but he seems 
to grope his way like a man without a clue." ^ A strange judg- 
ment in view of the clear prospect Thucydides holds out from 
the beginning of writing the whole war down to 404, and of his 
premature statement that it is written.* A theory which 
requires us to find the narrative of the Four Hundred " dull 
and spiritless " needs some reconsideration. 

Jowett thought better of the Eighth Book. " The love of 
truth, the power of thought, the absence of moral approbation 
or disapprobation, the irony, the perception of character, ^ 
the moderation of statement, the general excellence, no less than 
the mechanical arrangement into summers and winters, and 
the minutiae of language and phraseology, * cry aloud,' in the 
words of Marcellinus, that the Eighth Book is the composition 
of Thucydides." The sentence sums up well many of the 
characteristics of the historian, with some of which we have 

1 Iliad, xii. 113; xvi. 46, 686, etc., and Hellenica, iv. 4, 3. 

2 Matthew Arnold spoke of a history of EngHsh Uterature being 
*- written to the tune of ' Rule Britannia.' " 

^ Thucydides Mythistoricus, 244. * Thuc. v. 26. 

^ Dionysius thought Thucydides weak in this point, ethos, at least 
as compared with Herodotus, but allowed him better in pathos. 



i 



94 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



already dealt — inevitably, for wherever one touches Thucydides, 
the whole man is involved.^ The ancients laid stress on 
his vividness and his pathos. No more need be said for the 
moment of the latter. But let the reader run over in his mind 
such scenes as the opening of the war, the coming of the 
Ambraciot herald, the building of the fort at Pylos, the sailing 
of the great fleet for Syracuse, Epipolae,^ the Terror in Athens, 
the fort of Eetioneia, and the whole story of the Four Hundred, 
and let him realize that in most of these instances the historian 
was not there at the time, and he will have a new sense of the 
power of the man. He went to one and another of the places 
afterwards, and, as Longinus says, he '* makes his account 
no longer a narrative but a living action" {ivayMvtov Trpay/jLo). 
The best hyperboles, Longinus says a few pages later, are those 
which are not noticed. "This happens when they are uttered 
in an outburst of strong feeling, and in harmony with a certain 
grandeur in the crisis described, as where Thucydides is 
speaking of the men perishing in Sicily. ' For the Syracusans,' 
he says, ' came down and butchered them, especially those in 
the river, and the water was at once spoiled, but they went 
on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, even 
fighting to have it.* That blood and mud were drunk together, 
and yet were things to be fought for, becomes credible in the 
intensity of the feeling and in the crisis." ^ 

It was thus the ancients read Thucydides, sensible of his 
power of mind, his austere grandeur, his restrained pathos. 
They, like ourselves, had to wrestle with his style and his 
grammar, his plurals and genders, his racking of every known 
construction, the tricks of phrase he learnt from Gorgias, the 
awful guesses in which he involved his readers (Sva-eiKaara toU 
TToXXot?), his diction "figurative, obsolete, archaized, and 
strange." * They wondered, like some of the moderns, whether 
he were an atheist, and made guesses as to the school in which 
he learnt his atheism — ^was it that of Anaxagoras ? ^ But 

1 Girard, Thucydide, 221 : " Quelque peu que Ton touche au livre 
de Thuc. on I'y entrevoit lui-meme." 

2 Thuc. ii. 7, 8 ; iii. 113; iv. 4 ; vi. 27 ; vii. 97 ff. 

3 Longinus, 25 and 38. 

* Dionysius, Letter to Ammaeus, 790, rr^v TpoiriKrjv koL yXa>TTrjixaTtKf)v koi 
a.iTr]pxa('<0[Jt'€vr}v koi ^evr]v Xe|ti/. 
^ Marcellinus, Life, 22. 



THUCYDIDES 95 

is he an atheist ? He never says, one way or the other. He 
remarks at once how much men are moved by the thought of 
the gods and how little. Seer and prophet and omen abounded 
when the Sicilian fleet sailed ; and when the disaster came, 
men were angry with the prophets who misled them.^ Men 
appeal to the thought of the gods in distress, and their enemies 
brush the appeal aside. The Eumolpidai and Heralds, who 
had put the curse on Alcibiades, " called heaven and earth 
to witness that the city must never restore a man who had 
been banished for profaning the mysteries." ^ The city did 
recall him ; the curse was taken off ; and Alcibiades celebrated 
the mysteries with his troops. But the strangest case was 
that of Nicias — '* least deserving of all Greeks in my time to 
come to such misfortune, for he livedjin the practice of every 
virtue." Professor Bury deflects thefparticiple (vevo^ta-fievqv) 
from practice to virtue — " every conventional virtue " — and 
finds not encomium but malice in the sentence. I do not think 
so. 3 The man is deeper and greater than such a mood at such 
a moment. Yes, Nicias was pious, even superstitious, but he 
failed in " strength of nature " — he was not strong enough 
nor clear enough — perhaps it was due at the last to his kidney 
disease — ^perhaps there was always the weakness of cautious 
self-protection about him. 

But, after all, opinions about the gods — or about anything 
— are not Thucydides' immediate affair. This is what hap- 
pened, and may happen again ; if the reader wishes to have a 
true picture of it, here it is ; the picture shall speak for itself. 
Thucydides an Athenian fecit 

1 Thuc. viii. i. 2 xhuc. viii. 53. 

* I find Mr. Lamb is also against the idea of irony — " are we to 
take it as ironical, and not merely a remark on the ways of the universe, 
when we read that the plague was most deadly to those who had any 
pretensions to virtue — Ste^^eipoj/ro, kcu ixaKiara oi dperfjs ri fieraTToiovfievot 
(ii. 51, 5) ? " {Clio Enthroned, p. 74). 



CHAPTER IV 
ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 

" T" N those old happy days " is the phrase of Demos- 
I thenes as he looks back over eighty years to the time 
JL when his country ruled an empire and ruled herself 
and her own citizens, when the assaults of her enemies had 
broken down and she had not yet wantonly ruined herself 
in the Sicilian expedition.^ It is in human nature to idealize 
the past — when Prometheus made the first man, he slaked 
his clay ^ with the water of Lethe, it seems, and we forget in 
the long run what it pains us to remember. " In those old 
happy days " Aristophanes was impressed with the degeneracy 
of his contemporaries, when he thought of the men who had 
fought at Marathon. And yet for us who read Athenian 
literature, those days do represent the very midsummer of 
Greek genius. The glory passed away ; the war, that was 
to safeguard it, proved the occasion of its undoing. The 
Athenians " did all that Pericles told them not to do " ; his 
successors, " each one struggling to be first himself, were 
ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whim of 
the people " ; it was not that they were unequal to the tasks 
they undertook, but that they should never have undertaken 
them at all, or, undertaking them, they should have kept 
their minds to them ; so '* in the end they were overthrown, 
not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal 
dissensions." ^ We have seen something of the wonder of the 
age of Pericles ; we have now to look at the city he left — its 
policies, its government, its people, and its general life. 

Our concern is with a nation in war-time, and this compels 

1 Meidias, 143. 

2 Pausanias saw some of this clay preserved as a relic (x. 4, 4), but 
the water of Lethe is the fancy of a much later mythographer. 

3 Thuc. ii. 65. 

96 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 97 

us to consider more closely the whole question of the Pelo- 
ponnesian War. How came it about that Athens and Sparta 
fought so long and that they fought at all ? To us, war is 
essentially an exceptional condition, disorganizing life in every 
country in any way concerned with either belligerent power. 
Steamships and electric telegraphs and international loans have 
made the whole modern world acutely and quickly sensitive 
to what happens in any part of the earth, and it is difficult 
to think ourselves away from these basal factors of human life 
as we know it. The Peloponnesian War vitally affected the 
whole economics of all Greece and altered the conditions on 
which men and cities should live, and, in the insensible way in 
which such things come, it changed the very axioms of political 
thought. Yet the men who made the war in the first instance 
did so to prevent change. 

The central figure in the whole discussion as to the war and 
its origin is Pericles. Some part of this eminence he owes to 
his fellow-countryman, Aristophanes. This is not begging 
the question. There were, no doubt, statesmen in the other 
cities, but we hardly know their names — a few names at 
Sparta, none at all in Corinth,^ or if we do know them we forget 
them quite easily. Pericles made the war, says Aristophanes ; 
and so says Plutarch long after in his biography, relying on 
Aristophanes and on others less famous. " All the same,'* 
he says, " embassies were sent, and sent again, to Athens ; 
and the Spartan king, Archidamos, did his bCvSt to bring most 
of the grievances to a friendly settlement and to pacify the 
allies ; so that it looks as if the war would not have come upon 
the Athenians, if they had been persuaded to rescind the 
Megarian decree and be reconciled with the Megarians. It 
was Pericles who offered the strongest opposition to this, and 
who egged on the people to stand to their quarrel with Megara, 
so he alone had the blame of the war. ... He seems to have 
had in his mind some secret and private grievance against the 
Megarians." ^ Before long Plutarch, as was inevitable, refers 
to " the famous and hackneyed lines of Aristophanes,*' and 
then, like a loyal Greek of his period, edges away from them. 

1 Unless one counts the filibuster, Timolaos, of Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 

2,3. 

2 Plut. Pericles, 29, 5 ; 30, 2. 

7 



98 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

" What the original cause was, it is not easy to learn ; but 
for the decree not being rescinded all alike blame Pericles.** 
Then he hazards another suggestion, offered by antiquity — 
the prosecution of Pheidias, followed by his death in prison 
and his alleged poisoning by some agent of Pericles, who feared 
his revelations — a whole tissue of scandal which we need not 
consider. Pheidias was prosecuted, to annoy Pericles, but 
another ancient writer says he died in Elis, where he made the 
great statue of Olympian Zeus. After Pheidias, then Aspasia 
and Anaxagoras, and their troubles — and then '* in fear of 
being tried himself, he availed himself of the war, which was 
lingering and smouldering, and he blew it into a blaze — in 
the hope that in this way he would scatter the charges brought 
against him and dissipate his unpopularity ; for, when the city 
came to be involved in great affairs and great dangers, she 
would trust herself to him alone, because of his reputation 
and his ability." And then Plutarch sheers away again — 
" the grounds for his refusing to let the people give way to the 
Spartans are alleged, but the truth is uncertain." Plutarch 
does not like these suggestions — ^he never liked anything that 
reflected on the glory of the ancient Greeks, as his dislike 
of Herodotus shows — ^but he found them in his books, and was 
uneasy at omitting them. His Life of Pericles is indeed one of 
his most significant works — most valuable as a collection of 
evidence, and delightful reading, but not a coherent or intelli- 
gible portraiture of a statesman. 

Plutarch at all events has preserved for us a fair mass of 
contemporary or semi-posthumous gossip against Pericles, and 
he has made the inevitable reference to Aristophanes. In 
425 B.C. the young poet produced The Acharnians, which is 
still one of the pleasantest and most attractive of his plays. 
It is a plea for peace, like so many of his comedies of the war- 
time. The hero, Dikaiopolis, has to plead for his life against 
the Acharnian elders, who are enraged with the Peloponnesians 
because of their ravaged lands — and the scoundrel has made 
peace on his account with the national enemy, and this is what 

he says : 

The|Lacedaemonians I detest entirely ; 
And may Poseidon, Lord of Taenarum, 
Shake all their houses down about their ears ; 
For I, like you, have had my vines cut down. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 99 

But after all — for none but friends are here — 
Why the Laconians do we blame for this ? 
For men of ours, I do not say the State, 
Remember this, I do not say the State, 
But worthless fellows of a worthless stamp. 
Ill-coined, ill-minted, spurious little chaps. 
Kept on denouncing Megara's little coats. 
And if a cucumber or hare they saw. 
Or sucking-pig, or garlic, or lump-salt. 
All were Megarian, and were sold off-hand. 
Still these were trifles and our country's way. 
But some young tipsy cottabus-players went 
And stole from Megara-town the fair Simaetha. 
Then the Megarians, garlicked with the smart. 
Stole, in return, two of Aspasia's hussies. 
From these three Wantons o'er the Hellenic race 
Burst forth the first beginnings of the War. 
For then, in wrath, the Olympian Pericles 
Thundered and lightened, and confounded Hellas, 
Enacting laws which ran like drinking-songs, 
That the Megarians presently depart 
From earth and sea, the mainland and the mart. 
Then the Megarians, slowly famishing, 
Besought their Spartan friends to get the Law 
Of the Three Wantons cancelled and withdrawn. 
And oft they asked us and we yielded not. 
Then followed instantly the clash of shields.^ 

Aristophanes is explicit, as a comic poet should be. He 
is not weighing evidence, nor writing for the encyclopaedias 
of posterity. His business is to discredit the war and make 
it look trifling, and if there were other causes for it — well, it 
was seven years ago, and the festival of Dionysos needs no 
history lecture ; it had other aims. So that if we do not get 
history from the poet, what right had we ever to expect it ? 
The French critics are quite right who cite Aristophanes as 
one of the striking examples of the power great writers have 
of paralysing critics and obscuring facts. ^ Indeed, there is an 
attractive suggestion that in the story of the Three Wantons 
Aristophanes is parodying the opening of the history of 
Herodotus. The decree he gently adapts — misquotes would 

^Aristophanes, Ach. 509-539, the translation of Mr. B. B. 
Rogers. 

* Langlois and Seignobos, Intr, to Study of History, p. 171. 



100 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

be too hard a word — to a famous drinking-catch of Timocreon 
of Rhodes : ^ 

Blind Plutus ! would nor earth, 
Nor sea, nor mainland might behold thee ! 

But Tartarus, void of mirth, 
And Acheron's dismal stream enfold thee ! 
For all the ills there be, 
Blind Plutus, come from thee ! 

Now suppose all he says is true — that Simaetha was stolen, 
and two other girls stolen in requital, and that Aspasia told 
Pericles — what an absurd account of a great war's origin ! 
" Exactly/' Aristophanes might say, *' so you begin to suspect 
humour in a comedy ! Admirable ! " The suggestion that 
Aspasia kept hetairai is matched by the statement, made a 
little above and constantly repeated, that the mother of 
Euripides was a greengrocer. The only really relevant facts 
seem to be that there were custom-house quarrels with Megara, 
followed by a decree excluding the Megarians from — some- 
thing, and then a war, and vines cut down.^ To the decree 
we shall return. 

Four years later, Aristophanes in another play explained 
why Peace had vanished, and how she was to come back. 
Hermes himself tells the story to Trygaios, the beetle hero, 
and to the chorus : 

Hermes. Pheidias began the mischief, having come to grief 
and shame, 
Pericles was next in order, fearing he might share the blame, 
Dreading much your hasty temper, and your savage bulldog 

ways. 
So before misfortune reached him, he contrived a flame to raise, 
By his Megara-enactment setting all the world ablaze. . . . 
There was none to stay the tumult ; Peace in silence disappeared. 
Trygaios. By Apollo, I had never heard these simple facts 
narrated, 
No, nor knew she was so closely to our Pheidias related. 

Chorus. No, nor I, till just this moment : that is why she 
looks so fair. 
Goodness me ! how many things escape our notice, I declare.' 

1 If this is rendered a little freely, and epithets added, " it seemed 
inhuman somehow," as Plutarch says, not to rhyme a catch. 

2 Cf. Andocides, 3, 8, §ta Meyapias TroXefirjo-avres. 
^ Aristophanes, Peace, 608-618 (B. B. Rogers). 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME loi 

How many things do escape our notice ! How many 
years was it since Pheidias met his troubles — would it be 

twelve, or fifteen, or ? However, the play is getting on, and 

no one would wish to miss it just to calculate a date. Modern 
scholars cannot quite be sure of the exact date of Pheidias* 
trial, and it is hardly necessary that they should be. Here 
is an entirely new account of the war. *' I never heard of it 
before/' " Nor I." 

However, the suggestion has been taken up quite seriously. 
Pericles, according to Julius Beloch (to whom students of 
history are indebted for much that is better), saw the storm 
coming and made war to turn it in another direction. Cleon 
and the extreme Left (if one may borrow a useful form of 
political speech from the French assembly) had begun their 
attacks — on the outposts so far, Pheidias, Anaxagoras, etc. 
Pericles saw his danger ; so, when the Corcyraean alliance 
was offered, involving war as it did, he secured that it was 
accepted ; and then he worked steadily for a breach, seizing 
first the opportunity offered by the Poteidaian affair, and 
then standing out about the Megarian decree. The war was 
sure to come at some time, Beloch holds ; that it came precisely 
when it did, was the work of Pericles. The moment was not 
a favourable one ; one -third of the available forces were away 
in Thrace, and every year of peace would be an inestimable 
gain for Athens and for Greece. Pericles knew all this — and 
chose war, because it suited him, convinced, of course, that 
Athens would win, because she could outlast her enemies. 
But the best issue to the war could only be a dull peace or the 
status quo.^ Beloch further holds, or held, that Pericles mis- 
managed the war itself. He might have held the passes of 
the Geraneia range, though, with the Boeotians in his rear, 
this might have involved great risk. He might further have 
attempted a bold offensive, supported by a democratic pro- 
paganda in the Peloponnesus and Boeotia. It would have 
been a venture, but, as Alcibiades saw later on, it was the only 
way to victory. Pericles' war-policy required a more glitter- 
ing success than it got, and when the plague came on top of 
a dull and uninspired war, the storm broke, as Thucydides 
tells us. 

1 Beloch, Gr. Gesch. (ed. i), i. pp. 515-518. 



102 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

These views are not generally accepted. The conduct 
of the war was indeed dull and wearing, but nothing else was 
possible. The sea was the Athenian element, and Pericles, as 
Beloch sees, could not count on his land forces beating the 
Spartan and Boeotian hoplites in the field. It was the Spartan 
strategy to force such a battle, ^ and the hot-heads in Athens 
wished it. Pericles refused it altogether — even Plataea was 
allowed to fall.^ Nor does the suggestion of a democratic 
propaganda seem a very good one. The connexion with 
democratic Argos, advocated by Alcibiades and carried through 
by him, had never really helped Athens, and did not now. 
Democratic plots in Megara and Boeotia were tried in the first 
ten years of the war, as readers of Thucydides remember, but 
they miscarried.^ Pericles* war-policy was to be, as Thucydides 
represents it, an inglorious one ; it was to lay a great sacrifice 
on the country population, and to strain to the utmost the 
nation's confidence in its leader.* 

It is on Pericles' conduct of the war that another brilliant 
theory is shipwrecked. Mr. Cornford maintains that Pericles 
was pushed from behind into the war, by people who had 
other aims than his. " Sicily was in view from the first. 
Not in Pericles' view. . . . Pericles did not want to conquer 
Sicily, but some other people did ; and they were the people 
who forced on Pericles the violent measures against Megara." 
These people were the trading interests down in the Peiraieus, 
and Thucydides never saw through their game ; so to him 
'* the Sicilian enterprise was an irrelevant diversion." ^ The 

^ Grundy, Thuc. p. S33, says the forcing of such a battle was practi- 
cally their whole design. 

2 If the open country of Attica was in any case to be abandoned to 
Spartan raids, there could have been little use in holding a fortress at 
the foot of one of the passes. Hence Plataea was not of real military 
significance to the war plans of Athens. It meant more to Thebes. 

« Thuc. iv. 66-74, 89-101. 

* Cf. Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii. p. 819. 

5 Thucydides Mythistoricus, pp. 38, 51. Residents in Cambridge 
who heard it are not likely to forget Dr. Verrall's brilliant lecture on 
The Birds in 1908, in which he suggested that the play was an attack 
on '• Palestinian religion." A great Cambridge scholar has wickedly 
suggested that Dr. Verrall's theory and Mr. Cornford's may be readily 
combined — of course, the war was contrived in that synagogue down 
in the Peiraieus. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 103 

drawback is that there is nothing in the first fifteen years of 
the war that is inconsistent with the account given by Thucy- 
dides of Pericles' motives. There were people who dreamed 
of conquering Sicily and conquering Carthage — so Aristophanes 
joked of Hyperbolus in 424 b.c.,^ and Plutarch says the dream 
goes back to Pericles' own day ; but, after all, Thucydides' 
story is clear and consistent and intelligible. 

Athens was offered the alliance with Corcyra, a power so 
far neutral. If she refused, the balance of power would at 
once be upset by Corinth becoming mistress of the Corcyraean 
fleet. She accepted, and herself upset the balance of power ; 
for now the Corinthians and their allies were at a disadvantage. 
Pericles must have foreseen this, and preferred that, if the 
balance were to be upset, the advantage should fall to Athens. 
The Corinthians were now in a difficult position — Athens on 
the gulf on the eastern side, Corcyra controlling the sea-route 
on the west. With desperate efforts Corinth got Sparta to 
move, and the war was made. Seven years before, at the 
time of the siege of Samos, 440-439 B.C., Corinth had intervened 
and stopped Peloponnesian aid being sent to the Samians. 
Once again Corinth was the decisive factor, and this time for 
war ; and Corinth was as little enthusiastic as Sparta about 
the rights of Megara. 

War then was voted by the allies in the autumn of 432. 
As military operations could not begin before the next spring, 
the winter was spent in diplomacy, not to secure peace, but to 
discredit Athens with the Greek world at large, and Pericles 
with the Athenians. Various demands were made, relating 
to Potidaea, Aegina, the maternal connexions of Pericles, 
above all the Megarian decree,^ and finally a message in two 
sentences : *' The Lacedaemonians desire to maintain peace, 

1 Aristophanes, Knights, 1303. 

* The stress laid on this for their own purposes by the Spartans and 
their aUies impressed the Athenian mind — the popular mind that did 
not go deeply into things. Cf. Bury, Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 
95-99 ; Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii. 817. Mr. E. M. Walker quotes a saying 
of Greville's that the secrets of cabinets are known only to the man in 
the street. In our days the Opposition newspapers always seem to 
know them best. The autumn and winter of 19 14-15 gave many 
illustrations of how readily the popular mind will believe things and how 
independent it can be of evidence. 



104 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and peace there may be if you will restore independence to the 
Hellenes." There were some two hundred and fifty city 
communities comprised in the Athenian Empire. The demand 
was a clever one — a much better stroke than the Megarian, 
and of far wider appeal.^ How little it meant was seen in 421, 
when Sparta made peace and forgot the autonomy of all 
Greeks, and again after 404, when " the first day of Greek 
freedom " ^ opened a period of disillusionment. For the 
present, however, as Thucydides says, " the feeling of mankind 
was strongly on the side of the Lacedaemonians ; for they pro- 
fessed to be the liberators of Hellas. Cities and individuals 
were eager to assist them to the utmost, both by word and 
deed. . . . For the general indignation against the Athenians 
was intense ; some were longing to be delivered from them, 
others fearful of falling under their sway." ^ 

Pericles was prepared. He recognized the twofold weakness 
of the enemy, who lacked ships and sailors, for one thing, and, 
for another, money.* He also saw their strength, and resolved 
to have no battle on land. Certain principles Thucydides repre- 
sents him to have emphasized — no surrender to the Pelopon- 
nesians ; ^ the abandonment of the land, but ** keep a watch 
over the city and the sea," as if Athens were in fact an island ; ® 
no new acquisition of empire ; ' and a firm hand on the allies.^ 

His plan of action we have already seen. He saw that 
the twin-fortress of Athens and the Peiraieus could not be 
taken, nor even menaced, from the land. The Spartans and 
their allies had in the past been notoriously weak in siege 
operations, and even in this war the small inland town of 
Plataea was their one success. Meanwhile men live by bread, 
and Athens held the wheat-route from the Black Sea. To 
secure the western grain trade embassies were sent to the 
islands near the Peloponnese — Corcyra, Cephallenia, Acarnania, 
and Zacynthus, with the aim of " completely surrounding 
the Peloponnese with war." ^ Accordingly we find in the 

^ This demand was obviously not so available an explanation of the 
war for the peace party ; they could not push peace at this cost. The 
Megarian decree was a better subject for their emphasis. 

2 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 23. ^ Thuc. ii. 8. 

* Thuc. i. 142, 6, and i. 141, 5. ^ Thuc. i. 140, i. 

« Thuc. i. 143, 5 ; cf. ii. 62. ' Thuc. 1. 144, i. 

8 Thuc. ii. 13 ; cf. ii. 6^. ' Thuc. ii. 7. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 105 

early years of the war, where there is any policy beyond 
mere raiding and endurance, that the active operations of both 
parties centre about the Corinthian gulf. To maintain an 
effective blockade even with steamships is hard ; it was very 
difficult for the Athenians,^ but by 429 they compelled the 
Peloponnesian allies to take action in the gulf, with the result 
that Phormio won two brilliant victories for Athens. As to 
Attica, Pericles refused to allow a battle at all, or even for a 
while a meeting of the Assembly. Cleon Bung himself at him ; 
the comic poets wrote songs and devised taunts against him ; 
but nothing moved him. The first year of the war, if inglorious, 
still was not unsatisfactory. The enemy had cut down trees 
in Attica ; the fleet of Athens had made raids on the Pelo- 
ponnesus ; and Athens could keep it up longer. 

As we have already had to glance more than once at the 
Peloponnesian programme, it need not keep us so long. Thucy- 
dides, in a series of speeches, lets us see a good deal of the 
Spartan character — the slowness of thought — the general 
preference for ignorance of the world outside — the inertia that 
** let the Mede come from the ends of the earth before they were 
ready," that disappoints the hopes of all who count on Spartan 
help — " the old-time ways," quite out of date by now, if the 
Corinthian speaker is to be trusted. King Archidamos was 
against immediate war — he saw what it meant, and how un- 
prepared they were ; ^ but the vote went against him, " not 
to allow the Athenians to become greater." ^ 

Archidamos was right. They had neither fleet nor men 
to match the Athenians ; and whatever might be said before 
or after the event about borrowing the treasures of Delphi and 
outbidding the Athenians with higher pay for their foreign 
sailors, there was little attempt at this till after Syracuse.* 
Even then, crippled as she was, Athens from time to time 
swept, the Peloponnesian fleet off the sea, till it is plain, from 

1 To blockade the long coastline of the Peloponnesus, with all its 
headlands and bays, and the winds and currents that play round them, 
and to do it without a friendly port at all near, was a very difficult task 
for a fleet of sailing ships, which could carry little water and were not 
designed for long periods on the open sea ; compare complaints of 
Apollodorus, c. Polycl, 22, 23, on the hardships of riding at anchor 
in storm. See Chapter X. p. 331. 

2 Thuc. i. 80-85. ^ Thuc. i. 86. * Thuc. i. 121, 3. 



io6 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Cyrus' caution to Lysander/ that the Persians grew tired of 
paying for fleets to be built and lost. Archidamos saw, 
according to Thucydides, that it was useless to ravage Attica, 
so long as the Athenian food supply came by sea.^ Twenty- 
three years later his son and successor Agis saw from Deceleia 
the swarms of wheat ships running into the Peiraieus, and said 
it was no use to cut off the Athenians from the land, if they 
could also not cut them off from the source of that sea-borne 
wheat. 3 It was not till Lysander had achieved this, that 
Athens fell. But it was out of the question in 432. The only 
real chance lay in some fatal Athenian blunder, as Pericles 
said. 

Archidamos was an old man. He had been king of Sparta 
when the great earthquake shook down every house but five, 
when crags fell from Taygetus, and great chasms opened in the 
earth, when the Helots sprang into revolt, and when he himself 
saved the Spartan nation by sounding " To arms ! " so that 
when the Helots came to plunder the wrecked five villages, 
the men of Sparta were armed and in battle order, waiting for 
them.* The fight with the Helots for Messenia had been long 
and difficult. The old man knew where Sparta stood, and how 
she stood — a handful of Spartiates amid a hostile population, 
fewer than at the time of the great revolt, perhaps one in 
sixteen ; and the Helots were '' a fierce and not a docile race." 
'* The Helots," wrote Aristotle, "have often attacked the 
Laconians, for they are always on the look out as it were for 
any disaster that may befall them." ^ " Most of the Spartan 
institutions have at all times been designed to secure them 
against the Helots." ® In spite of Plutarch's fine phrase about 
Sparta preferring law-abiding citizens to the rule over all 
Greece, it was probably the Helot peril that dictated her 
abandonment of the headship of Greece after the Persian War.' 
Even now she was not safe, and victory over Athens, involving 
rule over the Greek world, might be as dangerous as defeat. 

^ Xen. Hellenica, ii. i, 14. ^ Thuc. i. 81. 

3 Xen. Hellenica, i. i, 35. * Plut. Cimon, 16. 

^ Aristotle, Politics, ii. 9, § 2, p. 1269 a. 

• Thuc. iv. 80. There is, of course, a variant translation, which has 
strong support — ^perhaps more among grammarians than historians. 
' See Chapter II. p. 47. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 107 

Thus the unimaginative conservative habit and the vivid 
sense of ever-present danger at home combined to make Sparta 
" more shy of war than any other state of importance — except 
England in the nineteenth century." ^ 

But Corinth had turned the scale, and it was to be war. 
Athens was growing too strong, and Sparta had been brought 
to see it at last. Some modern historians hold that Athens 
had been stronger in 446 than she was in 432, but an analysis 
of her position confirms Thucydides. At the early date she 
held more, it is true, but her hold was precarious, as the year 
446 proved. Land-possessions were a danger to her. But 
now she was rid of them and held an empire everywhere 
accessible to her fleet — an empire, of islands actual or virtual, 
divided into fragments by the sea, which the Athenian fleet 
ruled. 2 And the alliance with the great maritime island- 
power of the West promised still further aggrandizement. So 
Sparta went to war. " At that time the youth of the Pelo- 
ponnesus and the youth of Athens were numerous ; and their 
inexperience made them eager for war." ^ "At that time " — 
the words suggest the contrast which the historian lived to see ; 
the numbers were thinned ; the experience of war was grim, 
and the spirit and enthusiasm flagged before the end. 

'* Neither side meant anything small," Thucydides says. 
Yet we have seen how unprepared Sparta and her allies were. 
They put, Plutarch says, an army of sixty thousand men into 
Attica, to ravage it. They tried to secure command of the 
Western waters and to break the Athenian blockade, not very 
successfully. They destroyed Plataea, making a great siege 
of a small town. But their fleet was poor, miscellaneous, and 
ill-manned ; and, as for improving it, " War," said King 
Archidamos, * *' is a matter of finance ; and we have no money in 
our common chest, and we are not very ready at paying it out 
of our private stores." A broken inscription, inaccurately 
copied, survives to tell of contributions to the war-funds, but 

^ So Eduard Meyer, some years before 19 14. 

2 The Athenian OHgarch's Ath. Rep. 2, 2. A rather different view 
from that given above, in Grundy, Thuc. p. 323 f. 

3Thuc. ii. 8, I. 

* Thuc. i. 83, 2, and 80, 4. Aristotle noted the same thing about 
Sparta, a century later, Pol. ii. 9, t,6, p. 127 16: --They are bad at 
paying eisphora (war-tax)." 



io8 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the only contributors whose names are legible are the Melians 
and two private persons.^ The Spartan plan for the war was 
invasion, with the war-cry of " Greek freedom."^ 

The war-cry was a good one, and " they expected within 
a few years to destroy the Athenian Empire." ^ All Greece 
was excited, and, as we have seen, " the feeling of mankind 
was strongly on the Spartan side." * The Athenian allies, as 
Athens knew not less well than Sparta, wished to be inde- 
pendent — this passion was the greatest danger of Athens, the 
chief hope of Sparta. It was emphasized by the Corinthian 
speaker. 5 Before the war began, Mitylenaean envoys had 
been asking Spartan aid for a revolt against Athens.^ The 
speech which Thucydides attributes to the later Mitylenaean 
embassy at Sparta in 428 sets out what the allies felt. But 
really no further evidence is necessary, when we remember 
how, on the failure of the Sicilian expedition, when the Athenian 
fleet ceased to be, '' all Hellas was stirred . . . but none 
showed more alacrity than the subjects of the Athenians, who 
were everywhere willing even beyond their power to revolt,'* ' 
and did revolt. The Greek, says Mr. Grundy,^ " sought for 
the least common measure in life, the smallest form of associa- 
tion in which he could realize his individualism to the fullest 
extent which was, humanly speaking, possible." The cities 
wished to be, as a Spartan phrase puts it, avTovofiov koI 
avToirokie<i rav avTMv e'^ovTe^s — make their own laws, be each 
a city to itself, have each their own land.^ To this verb avro- 
vofieiaOaL, so much in the air, so much on the lips of Spartan 
envoys, Pericles in 432 added an adverbial clause which hit off 
the actual situation there and then in the Peloponnese, and 
what actually befell when the Athenian Empire came to pieces 
— it was Tot9 AaKehatiJLovioi^ eTrtTT/Seto)?, an *' autonomy in the 
interests of Lacedaemon." ^^ So it proved, as the Greeks 
were to learn from harmost and satrap, and more still when 

1 C.I.G. 15 1 1. Hicks, Manual No. 43 (not in second edition). 

2 Thuc. i. 139. 3 Thuc. v. 14, 3. 
* Thuc. ii. 8. ^ Thuc. i. 122. 

« Thuc. iii. 2, i. Cf. Aristophanes, Peace, 619, when the cities saw 
you start snarHng at one another, for fear of tribute they began to 
bribe the Laconian leaders. 

' Thuc. viii. 2. « Thucydides a7id his Age, p. 171. 

» Treaty in Thuc. v. 79. ^° Thuc. i. 144, 2. 






ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 109 

Antalkidas brought down his Peace from the King in 387. But 
that was still a long way off. Meanwhile, if the island cities 
were to be free from Athens, a navy was needed to put the 
Athenian fleet out of action, and it did not exist ; so the war- 
cry remained a fine phrase. It is significant that Brasidas 
used it with effect in 424,^ though Sparta was, as he must 
have known, on the point of dropping '' the liberation of all 
the Greeks " for good and all,^ and had already proposed to 
Athens a joint control of the Greek world. ^ 

The whole Spartan war-policy failed. The invasions of 
Attica merely proved the signal strength of the twin-fortress 
with command of the sea. Sparta came out of the war 
humbled, and did not regain credit till the blundering cunning 
of Alcibiades had involved Athens in the Argive alliance and 
the defeat at Mantineia. * Even then it needed that to the folly 
of the Syracusan expedition there should be added the Spartan 
fortification of Deceleia, the general revolt of the Athenian 
allies, and the steady subsidies of Persia — yes, and the final 
imbecility of the Athenian generals at Aegospotami as the 
crowning touch — before the power of Athens was broken. 

There were, it appears, throughout the whole struggle a 
war-party and a peace-party in Sparta, but it is in general hard 
to follow their relations. In Athens it is otherwise, for here 
life was more articulate. We have seen something of the 
groimds and policy of Pericles in making war, and we may 
now pass over to the other party as we come to know it in the 
years after his death — the party that struggled for peace against 
the class created, more or less, by Pericles himself, which 
owed its very livelihood to the arts of war and empire. 

If we may borrow once more the French terms, and group 
the Athenians as Right, Left, and Centre, the Peace party will 
range in the main from the Extreme Right to the Right Centre. 
Three or four distinct classes are to be recognized within the 
group. There are, first of all, the country people. *' The 
demos," says the bitter oligarch, " knows quite well that the 
enemy will burn nothing that belongs to it, nor cut down any 
tree of its owning, so it lives free from fear ; " they store their 

^ Thuc. iv. 85. 2 The truce of spring, 423. 

" Thuc. iv. 20, 4. * Thuc. v. 75, 3. 



no FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

own goods on islands, and can afford to look on at the ravaging 
of Attica, for they know that, if they take pity on Attica, 
they will pay for it in the loss of advantages of their own ; and 
he does not exactly blame Demos — Demos knows how to look 
after himself.^ What the country people had to suffer is set 
out with great vigour by Aristophanes ; they formed the kernel 
of the troops, and they had too much of it. He blames the 
taxiarchs for injustice in calling out men to serve : 

Making up the lists unfairly, striking out and putting down 
Names at random. 'Tis to-morrow that the soldiers leave the town ; 
One poor wretch has brought no victuals, for he knew not he must go. 
Till he on Pandion's statue spied the list and found 'twas so, 
Reading there his name inserted; off he scuds with aspect wry. 
This is how they treat the farmers.* 

Farms suffered, homes were burnt, trees were cut down, 
and trees meant vines and olives. The olive does not bear a full 
crop for sixteen or eighteen years, and it is at its best between 
forty and sixty. ^ As olive oil and wine were the two agricultural 
staples of Attica, the felling of such trees meant poverty for 
a lifetime to their owners. Plato in his Republic forbade the 
practice of cutting down the trees of Hellenic enemies,* but, as 
Cicero suggested, this world was not after all Plato's Republic.^ 
Thucydides, as well as Aristophanes, dwells on the furious 
indignation of the Acharnians in particular at the devastation 
of their deme — " they were in their own estimation no small 
part of the state," he says, a little unkindly. 
1% Along with the country people stood the well-to-do classes, 
at one, in the main, on the peace question, but not a homo- 
geneous group. "It is the better classes, ol hwarwraTot 
T&v TToXtrav, on whom the heaviest burdens are apt to fall,** 
says Thucydides.® They had to outfit triremes and sail on 
them as trierarchs, and they had to pay the eisphora, the 
war tax levied on property— and all in addition to the liturgies 
of peace, the outfit of choruses, feasts, etc' Every democracy 

1 Athenian Oligarch, Ath. Rep. 2, 14-20. Of. Chapter II. pp. 53-55. 

2 Aristophanes, Peace, 1179 i. 

" I owe this and much else to Mr. Zimmern's admirable book. The 
Greek Commonwealth. 

* Plato, Rep. V. 471. • To Atticus, ii. i, 8. « Thuc. viii. 48, i, 
' See further Chapter X. pp. 329-332. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME iii 

is sooner or later familiar with the bitter cry of the wealthy 
taxpayer, but in Athens taxation had some look of being really 
unfair.^ Some of the well-to-do were oligarchs, in principle — 
though, really, oligarch and aristocrat are vague terms ; they 
believed at least in a limited democracy, and the day came 
when they tried it — a democracy of so many thousand at most, 
all qualified to serve the state in arms.^ Some went much 
further, and were " Spartan-mad," i\aK(ovo^dvovv : 

Long-haired, half -starved, unwashed, Socratified, 
With scy tales in their hands.' 

*'What / hear," says Socrates in the Gorgias,* "is this, that 
Pericles has made the Athenians lazy and cowardly and 
talkative and greedy, by establishing first the system of fees." 
" You hear all that," rejoins Callicles, *'from the gentry with 
the broken ears" — for boxing was a Laconism of the day. 
They formed themselves into clubs, ''with a view to offices 
and lawsuits." 5 We cannot exactly say that they took the 
oath used by their like in some cities, according to Aristotle : 
" I will be hostile to the people (demos) and plan it all the 
ill I can " ; but they were ready enough to negotiate with 
Sparta, not merely from patriotism like a Nicias, but with 
treacherous intent, as appeared in the affairs of the Four 
Hundred and the Thirty. The " young men " of those sinister 
times were more or less of this school, and to some extent the 
knights.*^ 

These elements formed the permanent strength of the 
party against war. Beside them there would be the medley of 
people who turn elections and, in our country, especially by- 
elections — the moderates, and the opportunists, the anti-war 
democrats, and all the people who vote on side-issues, and love 
to be on the safe side, the winning side. There were also some 
with really wider and larger ideas, forerunners of Isocrates and 
a later day, men with Panhellenic sentiments, whose ideas found 

^ Cf. the Athenian Oligarch's Ath. Rep. and Xen. Symp. 4, 30. 

2 Thuc. viii, 97, i. 

"Aristophanes, Birds, 1281. 

* Gorg. 5 1 5 E. 

' Cf. Thuc. viii. 54, 3, with Aristophanes, Lysistrata, $77. 

" The vfavlaKoi ; Thuc. viii. 69, 4. Cf. also Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 23. 
See p. 187, note. 



112 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

a voice from time to time, as in the Peace of Aristophanes, where 
the hero addresses his prayer to Peace : 

When our fightings are stayed, and our tumults allayed, 

We will hail thee a Lady for ever : 
And O put an end to the whispers of doubt, 

Those wonderful clever 
Ingenious suspicions we bandy about ; 
And solder and glue the Hellenes anew 

With the old-fashioned true 
Elixir of love and attemper our mind 
With thoughts of each other more genial and kind.^ 

The same idea, carried to a further point, reappears in the 
Lysistrata.^ Using a simile from wool, the poet pleads for 

mingling 

All in one basket of unity, 
Citizens, visitors, strangers and sojourners, 
All the entire undivided community. 

Yes, and the cities also, colonies as they originally were of 
Athens, and weaving all into one web, for a cloak for Demos. 
But Demos was not shrewd enough to take the hint, or perhaps 
it came too late ; or, again, people whose ambition was to be 
autopoUtai, citizens of themselves, might not have wished to be 
woven into a cloak for Demos. 

Meantime Demos had other fancies in apparel. " Being 
bare," says Trygaios in the Peace, Demos took up HjTperbolus 
to gird himself with : 

You see, he deals in lamps : before he came 

We all were groping in the dark, but now 

His lamps may give our council-board some light.* 

It was to the successors of Pericles that Thucydides attributed 
the downfall of Athens. They were the products of the 
Athenian theory of Democracy, as developed by Pericles. 

The theory presupposed the Athenian people meeting 
in assembly to discuss national business. But the Athenians 

1 Aristophanes, Peace, 991-998 — a prayer as chimerical then as a 
similar one to-day for Europe would be according to some people. But, 
if history has lessons for us — let us think them out. 

2 Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 580-586. 

3 Aristophanes, Peace, 685-692. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 113 

never so met. Many of them were far too busy at the Peiraieus 
to go up to the city, or were away on outlying farms through- 
out Attica. Many must always have been out of the country 
on trading voyages, and constantly large numbers on naval 
and military expeditions. The Demos never really met — only 
some section of the community. But, as Aristotle said, there 
are people of an inferior tjrpe, because their life is inferior, 
since there is no room for moral excellence in any of their 
employments — mechanics, traders, and labourers. People of 
this class can readily come to the Assembly, because they are 
continually moving about in the city and in the agora. The 
Assembly ought not to meet when the country people cannot 
come. So thought Aristotle,^ but it did meet. It seems to 
have been only as a rule at elections that the voters of outlying 
districts took the trouble to make themselves felt. 

When the Assembly met, it was to transact business with 
a minimum of laws of procedure and a maximum of freedom to 
act. As everybody knows who has served on a committee, a 
permanent chairman or secretary becomes an autocrat, and the 
Athenian democracy avoided any such danger, though at some 
cost. As the Persian said, in Herodotus' story, the Demos 
comes tumbling and pushing into business, without any sense, 
just like a stream in spate.^ There is some truth in this, for a 
Greek demos knew none of the checks which we suppose to 
be as natural as democracy itself. There was obviously no 
representative system ; worse still, there was no ministry, no 
cabinet, no selected and tested group of men of experience jointly 
responsible as a body for advice or action. The Generals were, 
it is true, a board, but usually a divided board. Foreign affairs 
would have to be discussed, and there was nothing approach- 
ing a foreign office, just as there was no diplomatic service. 
Embassies were sent ad hoc, as we say, and in the fourth century 
travelling actors were sometimes available ; but as a rule the 
Ecclesia would have to depend on its own knowledge of foreign 
conditions and situations, acquired in travel or trade, or picked 
up somehow.^ When moreover we remember the passions of 

^ Aristotle, Politics, vi. 4, 13, p. 1319a. ^ Herodotus, iii. 81. 

* A very curious illustration is the story of the arrival of the bad 
news from Syracuse, preserved for us by Plutarch, Nicias, 30. Booker 
Washington, in his Up from Slavery, alludes to the curious ways in 
8 



114 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

a Greek people — "every multitude," said Polybius, " is fickle 
and full of lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent 
passion,"^ and Thucydides preserves stories enough of Athens 
to confirm the statement, even if he did put the other side 
in Pericles' speech — we can begin to realize the want of unity 
of mind, the want of responsibility, that marked the Ecclesia. 
The government of Athens, says Eduard Meyer, was really an 
anarchy down to Eubulus. Nobody was responsible for advising 
the nation ; anybody could speak ; nobody need. If a man 
did speak, if he moved a motion and it was carried, and mischief 
came of it, he was liable to suffer for it ; hence silence had a 
ready excuse and came naturally sometimes. Here is an 
illustration from Demosthenes, the story of what happened 
when Philip suddenly took Elateia, and established himself 
south of Thermopylae. 2 

" It was evening, and one had come to the Prytaneis with 
the news that Elateia had been taken. Upon this they rose 
from supper without delay ; some of them drove the occupants 
out of the booths in the market-place, and set fire to the 
wicker-work ; others sent for the generals and summoned the 
trumpeter ; and the city was full of commotion. On the 
morrow, at break of day, the Prytaneis summoned the Council 
to the Council-Chamber, while you made your way to the 
Assembly ; and before the Council had transacted its business 
and passed its draft-resolution, the whole people was seated 
on the hillside (on the Pnyx). And now, when the Council 
had reported the intelligence which they had received, and had 
brought forward the messenger, and he had made his state- 
ment, the herald proceeded to ask, ' Who wishes to speak ? ' 
But no one came forward ; and though the herald repeated 
the question many times, still no one rose, though all the 
generals were present, and all the orators, and the voice of 
their country was calling for some one to speak for her de- 
liverance.'' 

And yet for twenty-seven years this Ecclesia managed the 

which negroes throughout the South picked up war news and emanci- 
pation rumours, ahead of the white people. 

^ Polybius, vi. 56. 

2 Demosthenes, de Corona, i6g, 170 (Pickard- Cambridge). The 
firing of the wicker-work may be an alarm signal. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 115 

Feloponnesian War, and for many more years it had managed 
and still did manage the complicated business of an empire 
of two hundred and fifty cities, and did it all so well, that, 
but for a number of signal follies that a man might count on 
his fingers, the war would have been successfully ended and 
the empire kept. Alcibiades, speaking to the Spartans, 
declines to discuss Democracy — " about admitted folly, there 
is nothing new to be said." ^ Yet there must have been 
somewhere in that Assembly an amazing amount of sheer sense, 
business capacity, insight, and intelligence — not to speak of 
real knowledge of the actual conditions of the Greek world. 
From 478 to 405 it was the ruling force in the Greek world, 
and drove the Persian king out and kept him out. The 
Funeral Speech of Pericles must represent history pretty faith- 
fully after all. Alcibiades tells the Spartans that it is evil 
demagogues who lead the people astray, but that again is a 
statement that will bear investigation. 

Cleon is of course the most famous of all the demagogues, 
thanks to Thucydides and Aristophanes, and we have already 
given him a good deal of attention. Aristophanes describes 
himself in two plays as a sort of Herakles who faced the monster, 
for the safety of Athens and the islands, but in the description 
of Cleon as monster, perhaps the voice only is authentic — " the 
voice of a cataract, mother of destruction.'* No doubt the 
flatterers of Cleon are also taken from life. But Cleon was a 
significant figure in history, and, apart from his politics, his 
personality is interesting. Plutarch, with the Athenaion 
Politeia behind him, tells us that Cleon " first did away with 
the decorum of the hema, and, in speaking to the people, would 
shout and pull off his mantle, and slap his thigh, and pace up 
and down as he talked ; it was he who taught the politicians 
that cheapness and contempt for decency that soon after 
ruined everything." ^ Once he made the Ecclesia adjourn 
after waiting long for him — because he was busy, he had had 
a sacrifice and was entertaining strangers ; and the Athenians 
laughed and adjourned. ^ Aristophanes says they listened to him 
Every single man agape, 
Most like to mussels cooking on the coals.* 

1 Thuc. vi. 89, 6. 2 piut. Nicias, 8, 3 ; 'A^. HoX. 28, 3. 

3 Plut. Nicias, 7, 5. * Aristophanes, Babylonians Frag. 68. 



ii6 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

There was force and character about the man — violence, 
Thucydides said — a fine strong Jingo accent — there were no 
impossibihties with him ; the generals could do it if they liked 
— he could, if he were in their place ; and so on. And, as 
we know, he did it — once. Of course he was accused of taking 
bribes ; ^ perhaps he did. The Greek conscience was not 
very nice about the matter. He was reckless, ignorant, and 
ill-informed, and this was where he made his mistakes. He 
has the credit of being no friend to philosophy and the refine- 
ment of life, but he was not at all a worse citizen or worse 
man than many of the most brilHant of the new school. But 
he was vulgar, and that was unpardonable. More serious still 
was his insistence on war, which made him a danger to his 
country. On the other hand, he must have had a real gift for 
finance, 2 like his successor a decade later, the fatal Cleophon, 
another hopeless advocate of war to the last, when every 
sane mind could see it was as disastrous as it was impossible. 

The most fatal figure of all who stood on the hema was 
no lamp-seller or tanner or lyre-maker, but the brilliant 
Alcibiades. Eduard Meyer sums up his amazing youth, by 
saying that from boyhood up he looked on himself as the 
Crown Prince of Athens. He stood in a peculiarly close 
relation to Pericles as his ward, and perhaps there is no recorded 
incident of a most varied career more characteristic than the 
conversation (recorded or most happily imagined by Xenophon) 
in which the pupil of Socrates leads on the old statesman to 
discuss law and its nature. The youth plays Socrates to the 
life, and at last Pericles ends the discussion by saying : "At 
your age we used to be clever too, in such questions. It was 
just such matters we used to handle and practise our wits on, 
as you seem to be doing." '' How I wish," the youth rejoined, 
with a crowning Alcibiadism,^ " I could have known you when 
you were at your cleverest, Pericles ! " * He fascinated his 
countrymen with his brilliance and his audacity and clever- 

1 Aristophanes, Ach. s \ Knights, 834. 

2 Finance was the perpetual problem of Greek democracies. See 
Beloch, Gr. Gesch. ii. 25 ; see also Mr. Zimmern's Greek Common- 
wealth, p. 208, on the ** incredible poverty " of Greek cities. 

3 Cf . scholiast on Thuc. vi. 18, where he says that certain phrases 
are kut ^AXKi^iddrjv. 

* Xen. Mem. i. 2, 46. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 117 

ness,^ and alienated them. The popular leaders disliked him, 
for he outshone them altogether, and they worked for his ruin, 
and effected it twice, and each time the consequences to Athens 
were immediately and desperately unhappy. But in spite of 
their leaders, the people could not get him out of their minds. 
" I dare say," says Nicias, addressing the Athenians, 
" there may be some young man here who is delighted at 
holding a command, and the more so because he is too young 
for his post ; and he, regarding only his own interest, may 
recommend you to sail [to Sicily] ; he may be one who is much 
admired for his stud of horses, and wants to make something 
out of his command which will maintain him in his extrava- 
gance." 2 And so forth, about the colleague already elected 
to co-operate with him on the great expedition. The young 
man was ready with a reply. ^ 

" Those doings of mine for which I am so much cried out 
against are an honour to myself and to my ancestors, and a 
solid advantage to my country. In consequence of the dis- 
tinguished manner in which I represented the State at Olympia, 
the other Hellenes formed an idea of our power which even 
exceeded the reality, although they had previously imagined 
that we were exhausted by war. I sent into the lists seven 
chariots — no other private man ever did the like ; I was victor, 
and also won the second and fourth prize ; and I ordered every- 
thing in a style worthy of my victory. The general sentiment 
honours such magnificence ; and the energy which is shown 
by it creates an impression of power. At home, again, when- 
ever I gain eclat by providing choruses, or by the performance 
of some other public duty, although the citizens are naturally 
jealous of me, to strangers these acts of munificence are a new 
argument of our strength. There is some use in the folly of 
a man who at his own cost benefits not only himself, but the 
State." 

The weak point in Alcibiades was that he was charlatan 
as well as genius ; an element of make-believe can be traced 
through his whole career. He was not so sure a guide as he 
aimed at appearing ; he did not, for instance, take enough 

1 Plutarch on his cleverness in adapting himself to his environment 
-- with quicker changes than a chamaeleon " {Alcib. 23). 

2 Thuc. vi. 12 (Jowett). ^ Thuc. vi. 16 (Jowett). 



ii8 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

trouble to understand the real relations among the Peloponnesian 
powers, and so he involved his country in the Argive alliance 
and the defeat at Mantineia in 418 — with exactly the result 
he was working to avoid, the restoration of Spartan prestige. 
The Greeks perhaps were less sensitive about lying than we 
suppose we are, so that the series of tricks by w^hich he carried 
through his disastrous ideas in this case might not have injured 
his repute at home.^ Similar adroitness was credited to 
Themistocles, to Pericles, and to Nicias himself, in dealing 
with the Spartans. If Thucydides is right in his statement 
that Alcibiades dreamed he might be conqueror not only of 
Syracuse but of Carthage,^ it is a further indication of impulse 
and fancy outrunning insight, though, to be fair to him, he 
was not the onl}^ Greek of his day to play with the dream of 
conquering Carthage,^ nor was he the last. With Sicilian 
statesmen and adventurers it was no dream, but a business, 
and one in which, after putting forth all their powers, all alike 
failed. There may have been generous Panhellenic sentiment 
in the thought, but it should never have come within the range 
of practical politics in Athens — it was chimerical, however 
desirable. Plutarch expands the dream of Alcibiades to include 
Libya with Carthage, and then Italy, and finally the Pelo- 
ponnese.* 

The perplexing episode of the mutilation of the Hermae 
gave the democrat leaders their chance. The evidence against 
Alcibiades was absurd, except for a people in panic, but it 
worked out in his ruin. How he " showed them he was still 
alive " is familiar — in Sparta and in Sardis, the same brilliant 
figure captivating dull Spartan royalty and the adroit Tissa- 
phernes himself, and again in each case waking suspicion. 
After that came further triumphs — the launching first and 
then the wrecking of the oligarchy of the Four Hundred — and 
the crowning service which he did his country in the moment of 

^ Plutarch, it is true, says nobody praised his method, but it was 
a great achievement to spHt the Peloponnese {Alcib. 15). 

2 Thuc. vi. 15, 2. 

3 Cf . Aristophanes, Knights, 1303. Hyperbolus also dreamed of it. 
Plut. Pericles, 20, 3, says some did, even in Pericles' time. 

* Plut. Alcib. 17 ; probably it is parody that has come down some- 
how from contemporary enemies of Alcibiades ; of these there were 
plenty. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 119 

her supreme division against herself. The sailors at Samos 
would have sailed for the Peiraieus and added civil war to 
war with vSparta and Syracuse and the revolted allies. '* Then 
Alcibiades appears to have done as eminent a service to the 
state as any man ever did. For if the Athenians at Samos 
in their excitement had been allowed to sail against their 
fellow-citizens, the enemy would instantly have obtained 
possession of Ionia and the Hellespont " — and the Hellespont, 
as was seen seven years later, was vital ; it meant the daily 
bread of all Athens. " This he prevented, and at that moment 
no one else could have restrained the multitude ; but he did 
restrain them." ^ So he regained a great deal of his old hold 
on the Athenians, but the old suspicions did not even yet 
die — ^his enemies saw to that. Did he, or did he not, wish to 
be tyrant ? ^ Did his friendship with Tissaphemes point 
to such a desire? The slight defeat, inflicted on his pilot 
Antiochus by Lysander, in an engagement forbidden by 
Alcibiades himself, was used to secure his deposition, and he 
retired to a voluntary exile in a castle he held at Bisanthe, a 
place better known in our days as Rodosto^ (Spring 407). 

Two years later it was still a question with the Athenians, 
what to do or to think about Alcibiades. In the Frogs, pro- 
duced at the Lenaea 405, Aristophanes represents Dionysus, 
still wavering as to whether he will bring back Euripides from 
the dead, as he first meant, or Aeschylus, and finally asking 
both as to the best policy for Athens.* 

DioNYSOS. I'll take whichever seems the best adviser. 
Advise me first of Alcibiades, 
Whose birth gives travail still to mother Athens. 

Pluto. What is her disposition towards him ? 

DiONYSos. Well, 

" She loves and hates and longs still to possess." 
I want the views of both upon that question ! 

^ Thuc. viii. 86, 4, 5 (Jowett's translation), reading 7rp5>Tos, as 
Hude also does, against Mr. Stuart Jones' iTpS>rov in the Oxford text. 
irpSiTov hardly seems like a judgment of Thucydides at all — ^too epi- 
grammatic and, besides, doubtful. 

2 Thuc. vi. 15, 4, surely referring to this stage of affairs. 

* Xen. Hellenica, i. 5, 10-17. 

* Aristophanes, Frogs, 1420-1434, Professor Murray's translation, 
with the last line from Mr. B. B. Rogers. 



120 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Euripides. Out on the burgher, who to serve the state 
Is slow, but swift to do her deadly hate, 
With much wit for himself, and none for her. 

DiONYSOS. Good, by Poseidon, that ! — And what say you ? 

Aeschylus. No lion's whelp within thy precincts raise ; 
But, if it he there, bend thee to its ways ! 

DiONYSOS. By Zeus the Saviour, still I can't decide, 
One is so clever and so clear the other ! 

So the city is left in travail. He had done Athens deadly 
harm when in exile in Sparta ; and yet, lion's whelp as he was, 

who else could save Athens ? Yes, but So there it 

hung. 

One more service he did Athens, but in vain. He warned 
the generals before Aegospotami of their danger, and was 
snubbed for his pains. Then came the downfall of the Thirty. 
Alcibiades no longer felt secure even in Rodosto, and resolved, 
like a second Themistocles, to go to the gates of the Great 
King. But if Dionysos and Demos could not make up their 
minds about him, Critias did ; and he told Lysander Athens 
would never settle down under an oligarchy while Alcibiades 
lived. So one night in a Phrygian village the house was 
fired over his head. Alert to the last, he saw what it meant, 
flung his goods to the flames, and sallied out, sword in hand, 
to die fighting, but the barbarians preferred to shoot him down 
from a safe distance. The dead body, Timandra, the hetaira 
who was travelling with him, buried with all the honour she 
could give it — a last witness to his charm.^ 

Even so the man's story was not finished. The debate 
still went on — a sort of King Charles the First's head question — 
and he pervades the literature. Lysias reviles him ; ^ Xeno- 
phon defends Socrates against the charge of being too intimate 
with him ; ^ Plato draws him again and again in the Socratic 
circle, and perhaps sketches the '* Democratic man " from him * 
— a child of impulse, every pleasure a free and equal citizen 
in a many-sided character, beautiful, various, unsteady, a 
whole '* bazar " of notions and fancies and ideas, to one thing 
constant never ; and Aristotle, as we have seen, says history 

1 Plut. Alcih. 37-39. ^ Lysias, xiv. 

' Xen. Mem. 1. 2, 12-18, 24-39. 

* So Steinhart cited by Adam, ap. Rep. viii. 561c. On the demo- 
cratic man, see further, Chapter IX. p. 298. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 121 

deals with particulars — such as " what Alcibiades did or had 
done to him." ^ I 

So far we have been dealing with policies and politicians 
— always fascinating themes ; but in ancient history as in 
modern history there is always the same danger of forgetting 
how small a part of life is really covered by politics. History 
may be written too much from the Pnyx as from St. Stephen's, 
from inscriptions as from documents. We have to remember 
that throughout this long period, the twenty-seven years of 
the Peloponnesian War, life went on in Athens as far as it could 
on its usual lines — birth, marriage, and death, the ritual of 
temple and festival, and the Black Sea trade never stopped. 
*' Of all men," said Demosthenes, " we use the most imported 
wheat," 2 and it came from the Black Sea. The price of fish 
rose and fell — a too frequent subject among the fragments of 
the Comic poets ; Boeotian poultry and eels from Copais were 
scarce and dear, and wonderfully welcome when they did 
come. 3 Strangers came and went — merchants, travellers, 
sophists, envoys, from anywhere and everywhere — islanders 
to have their law-suits decided and to pay their tribute, 
Sicilians to teach the Athenians how to speak and write Greek, 
astronomers like Meton, Persian envoys, real ones * and, if 
we dare believe Aristophanes, sham ones too, and, what is 
more, Persian refugees.^ The Great King, if Aristophanes 
is right, took a close interest in Athens, for he wished to know 
two things : which of the belligerents was more powerful on 
the sea. 

And next, which the wonderful Poet has got, as its stern and 

unsparing adviser ; 
For those who are lashed by his satire, he said, must surely be better 

and wiser.' 

War-time brought with it of course special interests and 
excitements. The makers of weapons and armour are con- 
spicuous in Aristophanes' play. The Peace, as opponents of 

^ Aristotle, Poetics, 9, 3, p. 145 1&. 

2 Dem. de Cor. 87. Cf. Lept. 32, where he says 400,000 bushels 
a year from King Leucon's country. 

3 Aristophanes, Ach. 885 ; Peace, 1003 ; Ly si strata, 35. 

* Thuc. iv. 50. 5 Herodotus, iii. 80, Zopyros. 

• Aristophanes, Ach. 648. 



122 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

reconciliation — their occupation would be gone. It must 
have been a very considerable occupation at all times in Athens, 
and especially during the war. Old Cephalos, of Plato's 
Republic, who was glad he had been rich, because riches save 
a man from so much sin,^ had a shield-factory (his son Lysias 
tells us) in which he employed one hundred and twenty slaves, ^ 
and he and his made money, — *' We served in every form of 
choregia, and many a war tax we paid," — lived orderly lives, 
and ransomed many Athenians from the enemy. The number 
of fleets launched and of ships lost implies a very great ship- 
building industry in the Peiraieus, and a correspondingly large 
import of lumber from Macedonia,^ and perhaps elsewhere.* 

Of the sailing of a fleet we have two descriptions from this 
period. Thucydides tells us, in memorable chapters,^ how 
the great expedition set sail for Sicily. " Early in the morning 
of the day appointed, the Athenians and such of their allies as 
had already joined them went down to the Peiraieus and 
began to man the ships. The entire population of Athens 
accompanied them, citizens and strangers alike. The citizens 
came to take farewell, one of an acquaintance, another of a 
kinsman, another of a son ; the crowd as they passed along 
were full of hope and full of tears ; hope of conquering Sicily, 
tears because they doubted whether they would ever see their 
friends again, when they thought of the long voyage on which 
they were sending them. At the moment of parting, the 
danger was nearer ; and terrors which had never occurred to 
them when they were voting the expedition now entered into 
their souls. Nevertheless their spirits revived at the sight of 
the armament in all its strength and of the abundant provision 
which they had made. The strangers and the rest of the 
multitude came out of curiosity, desiring to witness ah enter- 
prise of which the greatness exceeded belief." The trierarchs, 
he goes on to say, had rivalled one another in the pains they 
had taken to make their ships beautiful and effective. " Men 
were quite amazed at the boldness of the scheme and the 
magnificence of the spectacle." " When the ships were manned 

1 Plato, Rep. i. 328Dff. ^ Lysias, c. Eratosth., 17-19. 

3 Thuc. iv. 108. 

* Perhaps Mount Ida ; cf. Xen. Hellenica, i. 1,25. 

•* Thuc. vi. cc. 30-32 (Jowett). 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 123 

and everything required for the voyage had been placed on 
board, silence was proclaimed by the sound of a trumpet, and 
all with one voice before setting sail offered up the customary 
prayers ; these were recited, not in each ship, but by a single 
herald, the whole fleet accompanying him. On every deck 
officers and men, mingling wine in bowls, made libations from 
vessels of gold and silver. The multitude of citizens and other 
well-wishers who were looking on from the land joined in the 
prayer. The crews raised the Paean, and when the libations 
were completed, put to sea. After sailing out for some distance 
in single file/the ships raced with one another as far as Aegina." 
That is a worthy description of a great moment in a nation's 
history, and it brings to us that suggestion of Tragedy which 
lies so near when we read Thucydides. But many fleets sailed 
sooner or later, some to come back eminently victorious ; and 
the conditions of the dockyard and the Peiraieus generally are 
given from another point of view by Aristophanes, and his 
picture deserves study no less : 

Ye would have launched three hundred ships of war, 

And all the City had at once been full 

Of shouting troops, of fuss with trierarchs. 

Of paying wages, gilding Pallases, 

Of rations measured, roaring colonnades, 

Of wineskins, oarloops, bargaining for casks. 

Of nets of onions, olives, garlic-heads. 

Of chaplets, pilchards, flute-girls, and black eyes. 

And all the Arsenal had rung with noise 

Of oar-spars planed, pegs hammered, oarloops fitted, 

Of boatswains' calls, and flutes, and trills, and whistles.^ 

Now and again we come on a personal note in our records, 
which gives us a closer look at what happened at these times. 
In a speech made by Lysias for some one whose name is lost, 
the speaker emphasizes what a fine piece of work he made of 
his ship when he was trier arch in 408 (or 407) at the time of 
Alcibiades' sailing. " I will offer you a convincing proof of 
this. For, in the first place, I would have given a great deal 
not to have him sailing with me, for he was no friend of mine, 
nor a kinsman, nor of my tribe ; but Alcibiades chose to sail 
on my ship. And yet I think you know that, as general and 
able to do what he pleased, he would not have embarked on 
^ Aristophanes, Ach. 544-554 (B. B, Rogers). 



124 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

any ship but the best sailer, when he was going to risk his own 
life/* 1 

The ships of Athens from time to time raided the Pelo- 
ponnese, as Thucydides mentions, ^ but there is no record of 
what impression the damage done made on the Peloponnesians. 
It must have been severe, and terrible too in its suddenness, 
but they " lacked a sacred bard." It is Aristophanes alone 
who gives them such sympathy as they get.^ The islanders 
bribed the chief men of Sparta, who 

Greedily embraced the war. 
But from this their own advantage ruin to their farmers came; 
For from hence the eager galleys sailing forth with vengeful aim, 
Swallowed up the figs of people who were not, perchance, to blame. 

No doubt the sailors and soldiers made something of the 
booty ; but it is not likely that this availed much to console 
the Attic farmer, lamenting " the dusky figtree I had loved 
and nurtured so," now felled by Peloponnesian invaders. 

One feature of an expedition sailing and war undertaken 
was the oracle- teller with his book,* the seer {fxavTi^), and the 
whole tribe of prophets. They were liable to error, as we find 
from Thucydides, and as the Athenians found, when the 
Syracusan expedition failed, and they vented some of their 
anger on the oracle- tellers. ^ They were very busy *' chanting 
oracles " when Uhe war began ; * and when the invasion 
of Attica took] place and all the Athenians stood about 
in groups in the streets, disputing whether to go out and fight 
or to forbear, the soothsayer was there with " oracles of the 
most different kinds." ' When the plague came, it established 
the reading \otfio<i as against Xt/^o? in a well-known oracle. ^ 
Nicias kept the breed in house and camp, though the prophet 
who gave the last fatal word for a delay of a lunar month, we 
learn, was not his familiar friend Stilbides, who really " took 
away much of his superstition," but another.^ Finally, in one 
play of Aristophanes' and another the oracle-teller comes in, 
an absurd figure, reciting silly and awful oracles in hexameter 

1 Lysias, xxi. 6. ^ Thuc. ii. 25, 56 ; iii. 7, 16 ; iv. 54. 

* Aristophanes, Peace, 624. 

* Aristophanes, Birds, 960 ff., with Xa/3e to j8i/3Xioj/ as a refrain. 

5 Thuc. viii. i. « Thuc. ii. 8. ' Thuc. ii. 21. ^ xhuc. ii. 54. 
» Plut. Nicias, 23, 5 ; Stilbides had died. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 125 

verse, and getting little out of it but ridicule. Yes, the trade 
was full of impostors ; but who could tell but that at last he 
might find a prophet who really knew ? ^ That hope seems a 
permanent weakness of mankind. 

Quite apart from individuals, the state also as a whole was 
guided from time to time by oracles. In the winter of 426, 
Thucydides says, the Athenians *' by command of an oracle 
purified the island of Delos." ^ Pisistratus, a hundred or more 
years before, had " purified " it so far as it lay within sight 
of the temple. Now the Athenians removed from the graves 
all the dead they could find — Thucydides may have been there, 
or he may owe his information to another, but he tells us that 
the arms found with the dead, and the mode in which they were 
buried, made it clear that more than half of them were Carians.^ 
That, however, was archaeology, and a private interest of the 
historian's ; it was piety that moved Athens to action. To keep 
the island pure for the future, it was ordained "that none 
should die or give birth to a child there, but that the inhabitants 
when they were near the time of either should be carried across 
to Rheneia," * an island close by. After the purification the 
Athenians celebrated the Delian games, which were held every 
four years ; and Thucydides again turns to archaeology and 
quotes the Homeric hymn to Apollo to prove the ancient Ionian 
festival there, and the musical contests, in which Homer had 
taken part, as the poet says himself — 

The blind old man from Chios' rocky isle. 

All that had been left of the festival had been the choruses, 
sent with sacrifices by the Athenians and the islanders ; but 
now the games were restored in full, and horse-races added. 

Plutarch tells us that Nicias took special pains about these 
religious observances at Delos. When the ships with the 
choruses arrived, the people used to crowd down to the wharves 

1 See the account of Hippias, Chapter I. p. 34. 

2 Thuc. iii. 104, on Delos. See J. Irving Manatt, Aegaean Days, 
p. 196 ff., on Delos and Rheneia, and the spacious and secure harbour 
between them ; and H. F. Tozer, Islands of the Aegaean, ch. i. 

3 Thuc. i. 8. 

* A modern Japanese parallel may be interesting. '* Until recently 
births and deaths were prohibited on the sacred island of Itsukushima 
in the Inland Sea " (W. G. Aston, Shinto, p. 25 1). 



126 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and call on them to sing ; and they would come ashore, robing 
and crowning themselves, and singing, in no order at all. 
Nicias, however, landed his chorus and offerings and everything 
on^ Rheneia, and brought a bridge ready-made, gilded and 
painted and hung with curtains ; and then at dawn he marched 
his procession over the bridge in order, singing as they stepped. 
He set up a bronze palm-tree in the god's honour, and bought 
a farm for 10,000 drachmas, whose revenues were to yield 
an annual banquet for the Delians, at which they were to pray 
to the gods for ** many blessings for Nicias." ^ Even so the 
Athenians were not quite satisfied, and in 422 they cleared the 
Delians out altogether, and Pharnaces, the satrap of Daskyleion, 
gave them a refuge at Adramyttium.^ A Delian inscription of 
about 403 is taken to be a decree of the Spartans reinstating 
the Dehans in possession of their own temple and temple 
treasure,^ just as the Melians and Aeginetans, as many as could 
be found, were given back their own lands. * Afterwards it is 
clear that Athens recovered and kept Delos— perhaps by 
377 B.C.5 

Delos was not the only centre of religion and festival. 
Alcibiades, as we have seen him boast, took care that Athens 
should be heard of at Olympia in 416. In 420 Lichas, a Spartan 
honourably known in the history of the period, ^ had won the 
chariot race with a chariot entered in the name of the Boeotian 
state, and when he had crowned his victorious driver, he had 
been struck by the officers, to the consternation of everybody.' 
But in 416 the glory all redounded to Athens. What is more 
curious, Euripides wrote a triumphal ode for the event, which 
Plutarch quotes to show (against Thucydides) that the third 
chariot of Alcibiades came in third in the race and not fourth.^ 
There is something to be said for Plutarch's canon that small 
things are often more illuminative than great.^ 

Beside the old ancestral gods of Delos and Olympia, new 
gods altogether begin in this period to be conspicuous in 

^ Plut. Nicias, 3, 4-6. 

^Thuc. V. I. For Pharnaces and his Greek interests, see Chapter 
VII. p. 210. 

3 Hicks and Hill, No. 83. « Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 9. 

5 Hicks and Hill, No. 104. « See Chapter VI. p. 169. 

' Thuc. V. 50. 8 piut_ jii^^^^ J j^ 

^ Plut. Alexander, i. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 127 

Athens. All sorts of strangers were settling there and bringing 
their cults with them — some coming as slaves, some as traders. 
For instance, in 411, in the Lysistrata Aristophanes makes 
the Proboulos refer to a strange occurrence of five years before, 
which posterity remembered^ — 

Has then the women's wantonness blazed out, 
Their constant timbrels and Sabazioses, 
And that Adonis-dirge upon the roof, 
Which once I heard in full Assembly-time, 
'Twas when Demostratus (beshrew him) moved 
To sail to Sicily ; and from the roof 
A woman, dancing, shrieked Woe, woe, Adonis ! 
And he proposed to enrol Zacynthian hoplites ; 
And she upon the roof, the maudlin woman, 
Cried Wail, Adonis ! yet he forced it through. 

Sabazios was a Phrygian god,^ and Adonis came from Syria, 
probably with Cyprus as a half-way house. ^ Asclepios also 
was moved from Epidauros to Athens, though, without losing 
his ancient abode, and inscriptions testify to clubs organized in 
his honour, and their members, orgeones. 

But while these universal gods with orgiastic rites begin to 
appear beside the local cults, which they were to overshadow 
and to obscure, far more characteristic of Athens are still 
those festivals of Dionysus, with which were associated the 
plays, Tragedies and Comedies, which men will never cease to 
read. Sabazios is long gone and Adonis with him, but Oedipus 
at Colonos and The Birds still live. I do not wish here to speak 
of them as literature, but rather to remark the circumstances 
of their production. Athens was at war — had been at war for 
years, and had suffered terribly in loss of life and wealth and 
spirit. Sophocles was an old man. When he was between 
fifty and sixty, Athens had made him a General, and he had 
commanded with Pericles at the siege of Samos, as we have seen. 
Nearly thirty years later in 413, some hold that Athens turned 

^ Plut. Nicias, 12, 13 ; and Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 389. 

2 Cf . Aristophanes, Birds [yediX 415), 873, Sabazios and the Great 
Mother. 

2 Aristophanes, Peace, 420. See Beloch, Gr. Gesch. ii, pp. 4, 5, 
on the incoming of foreign cults ; and W. S. Ferguson, Hellenistic 
Athens, 217. 



128 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 






to him again for political service and made him a Proboulos, in 
that endeavour for " sense, economy, and good order" which 
ended in the affair of the Four Hundred — "wickedness" ; the 
poet admitted that, ''but there was nothing better to do."^ 
Perhaps even then he was working at his Oedipus — an extra- 
ordinary poem for so old a man, one would say, if Euripides 
had not almost at the same time produced his Bacchae. 

That is the amazing thing — " I will not cease to wed Grace 
and the Muse — ^happiest of unions. Be it not mine to live 
without the Muse, but ever be garlands mine. Old indeed 
is the singer, but yet of Memory he sings " : 

eVi Toi yepcav 0.01,80s 
KeXadei MvafMoa-vvav.^ 

And that is true of them both, of Sophocles and Euripides 
— true up to the very end, and this in a community dragging 
desperately on with its death struggle. Athens has leisure of 
mind for masterpieces of art, and what is more — though it is 
difficult to put it into words and avoid the appearance of 
nonsense — Athens has still the corporate vitality that makes 
such masterpieces possible. She produced, it is true, no new 
Tragic X)oets of much account ; yet the old ones and she had still 
in common the energy of mind and abiindance of life on which 
a national poetry depends. When the two old men died and 
Agathon went away to Macedon, the change was felt. There 
were " thousands and thousands of youngsters making 
tragedies," — whole " Museums of swallows," — ^but none with 
vitality for more than one play at best.^ Dionysos had to 
descend into Hell again, this time not for Seniele, but for 
Euripides ; and he does it in the Frogs^ 

Once again the Frogs is another astounding illustration 

^Aristotle, Rhetoric, iii. 18, 6, p. 1419(2. Sir Richard Jebb in a 
note to his translation says it was another Sophocles, It may have 
been, of course — we know of another in Thucydides sent to Sicily 
(iii. 115) and exiled (iv. 65)— -but I am not sure. For the Probouloi, 
see Chapter VI. p. 186. 

2 Eur. Hercules Furens (rather after 424 b.c), 67$. Memory is not 
quite our plain English faculty, but the Memory of the Greek myth, 
who was Mother to all the Muses. Cf. Aesch. Prom. V. 461, and Plato, 
Theaetetus, 191 d. 

3 Aristophanes, Frogs, 89 ff. * More upon this in Chapter V. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 129 

of Athenian life and character. It was produced at the 
Lenaea of 405, between the last two great battles — Arginusae, 
with its horrible sequel of the trial of the generals, and 
Aegospotami — produced for a public festival, and its theme is 
literary criticism, the comparative merits of two great Tragic 
poets. There never was such a people ; they gave Aristo- 
phanes the prize — once more one remarks with wonder the 
amazing leisure of mind and resilience of character of this 
strange race. 

Aristophanes is in many things a typical Athenian — or at 
least so it must seem to moderns who read ordinary Athenian 
life in his plays and know that Athens valued him above all 
her comic poets, not merely as she came to value Euripides, 
for she crowned and crowned him again while he lived. From 
what we can make out from the fragments of other poets, the 
lines for Comedy were laid down by tradition, and food and 
drink and the phallos were inherent in the scheme ; and, just 
as the chorus was an essential part both of Tragedy and 
Comedy, they could not be left out. But there is little in- 
dication that Aristophanes wanted to leave them out, so 
riotously and triumphantly do his wit and his humour play 
about them. He stood with his people here. If it is urged 
that his plots are generally slight, and that the structure of 
his plays is generally the same, with the same type of opening 
scene and the same dependence toward the end on mere episode, 
some part of this may be due to tradition.^ At the same time, 
if genius be an infinite capacity for taking pains, genius is 
very apt to shirk unnecessary pains ; and if, like Shakespeare, 
it can borrow a plot, or, like Aristophanes, do without one, it 
will. A stranger feature in the Aristophanic play is the general 
absence of characters. Dikaiopolis, most of us would feel, 
could change places with Trygaios, or any other virtuous 
patriot of ordinary appetites ; either of them owes all he has 
to the poet — of wit and invention and love of ease — and is 
little more than a mask. The Cleon, the Euripides, the 
Socrates, and the Lamachus of the plays are frankly caricatures, 
hardly intended to be characters at all. Of psychology there 
is a minimum — no Aguecheek, no Shylock ; villains, knaves, 

1 Of this we might be more sure if we had the comedies of other 
poets of his day intact. 
9 



130 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

fools, absurdities, plenty of them, and all highly coloured 
and superbly funny. The women of the plays are few, and 
slighter than the men, and where they are not absurd, the 
interest is simply phallic ; even in a serious play like the 
Lysistrata the heroine makes no disguises about her strongest 
suit — ^her only one, it might be said. As a politician, Aristo- 
phanes is outrageously — ^gloriously — ^partisan ; and if anything 
is wanted to complete the comedy of his politics, it is supplied by 
historians, ancient and modern, who have taken them seriously. 
One could imagine his enjoyment at such a discovery, if 
certain historians have had any circulation in the Elysian fields. 
There is no writer of the period who so successfully takes 
us injto family life of a kind^ — cookery, tastes in dishes, the 
handiness of wife and daughter and Thracian slave-girl, 
domestic implements and incidents. ^ Above all, nowhere else 
do we touch the country life of Attica at all so nearly — outdoor 
and indoor ; take, for instance, the famous picture of the 
wet day and its relaxations in the Peace.^ But the pleasure 
of man and woman with nature as a background is a familiar 
theme in antiquity ; it is not so often that a poet has much 
attention for nature, when man and woman are away. Euri- 
pides had it, and so had Aristophanes, as the bird-lyrics show : 

Come hither any bird with plumage like my own ; 
Come hither ye that batten on the acres newly sown, 

On the acres by the farmer neatly sown ; 
And the myriad tribes that feed on the barley and the seed. 
The tribes that lightly fly, giving out a gentle cry ; 
And ye who round the clod, in the furrow-riven sod, 
With voices sweet and low, twitter flitter to and fro. 

Singing tio, Ho, Ho, tioHnx ; 
And ye who in the gardens a pleasant harvest glean. 
Lurking in the branches of the ivy ever green ; 
And ye who top the mountains with gay and airy flight ; 
And ye who in the olive and the arbutus delight ; 
Come hither one and all, come flying to our call, 

Tnoto, trioto, totohrinx.^ 

^ Another kind we shall see in Chapter XI. 

2 Aristophanes, Ach. 241-278. 

5* Aristophanes, Peace, 11 27-1 171. Cf. on this scene Countess 
Martinengo Cesaresco, Outdoor Life in Greek and Roman Poets (a charm- 
ing book), ch. ii. ; and Livingstone, Greek Genius, p. 129. 

* Aristophanes, Birds, 229 (B. B. Rogers), 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 131 

It is not every farmer even to-day who is friendly to the 
birds. Perhaps it was this flippancy about the loss of good 
grain that induced the audience to give the play only the 
second prize. I think it is only in Virgil in antiquity that 
we find such whole-hearted sympathy with birds and mice 
and other depredators who prey on the farmer — and both the 
poets loved the farmer too. 

" He of old/' writes Marcus Aurelius, " says, ' Dear City 
of Cecrops ! * and thou, wilt not thou say, ' O dear City of 
Zeus ' ? '* 1 It is Aristophanes he is quoting, and one of his 
earliest plays, though where Marcus read the Babylonians it is 
hard to guess, or why the phrase stayed in his mind. *' Dear 
City of Cecrops" represents the poet's attitude. He made 
fun of his fellow-countrymen — they expected it and wanted it, 
and he did it. He abused their leaders — and it looks as if 
they rather enjoyed it ^ — a trait of Athenian character worth 
remembering, for it was not shared by the Spartans, and the 
time came when Athens felt she could do without politics in 
Comedy.^ Their prevailing politics the poet never liked — 
war and empire and the ill-usage of other Greeks were repulsive 
to him. His is one of the friendliest voices we hear in Athens 
for the allies and all the Hellenes. 

It is a curious thing that one of Aristophanes' deepest 
antipathies gives us a clue to the real culture of his audience. 
How was it that he was able to quote so much of Euripides — 
to parody word and scene from him — and not miss fire ? 
Take it in conjunction with Plutarch's story of the Athenian 
prisoners in Sicily singing Euripides' lyrics,* and a good deal is 
achieved to vindicate against some modern critics the general 
high culture of the Athenian people. 

But, for all the amenities of life, the long war told on the 
national temper. The losses of life by war and plague, and 
by the Sicilian expedition, were enormous — " of many who 
went out, few came home." ^ *' What have you women to 

^Marcus Aurelius, iv. 23. 

* Grote (viii. 131) suggests the democracy was strong enough to 
tolerate unfriendly tongues. E. Meyer, iv. § 560, holds that the people 
rather liked having their leaders *■ chaffed " — even despised them. 

* Cf. speech of Critias, ap, Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 34. 

* Plut. Nicias, 29, 2. Cf. Chapter V. p. 140. 
^ Thuc, vii., last chapter. 



132 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

do with war ? " asks the Proboulos of Lysistrata, and she 
rejoins : 

She. Nothing to do with it ? wretch that you are ! 
We are the people who feel it the keenliesti 
Doubly on us the affliction is cast ; 
Where are the sons that we sent to your battle-fields ? 

He. Silence ! a truce to the ills that are past. 

What consolation Pericles' speech had for mothers of fallen 
sons may be wondered. 

For those who lived, the war made everything more 
difficult. The country people crowded into the city and lived 
where they could, " for eight years together, in tubs and 
turrets and crannies." ^ The Peloponnesian invasions steadily 
impoverished them, and living was always a struggle in a 
Greek city. Pay for service in the law courts, in the Ecclesia, 
on the ships, was necessary for poor freemen who had to 
compete with slave labour ; and the numbers of slaves in 
Athens must have been enormous — all to be fed, too. Cephalos, 
as we saw, had one hundred and twenty at the end of the war. 
If the pressure of slave on freeman was perhaps lightened, 
when the Spartans fortified Deceleia and more than twenty 
thousand slaves, mostly artisans, ^ ran away, others suffered 
heavily by the loss of this living property. Cattle and sheep 
were taken by the enemy, and all sorts of plunder. One very 
curious and interesting fact comes from the Greek history 
lately found at Oxyrhynchus.^ '* The Thebans made a great 
stride forward to all-round prosperity (evhaifioviav oXoKXrjpov) 
immediately the war began ; " for in the first place the menace 
of Athens led to the removal of population from many small 
and un walled places into Thebes, and so doubled Thebes, 
which, after the occupation of Deceleia, " did much better, 
for they bought cheap the slaves and the other plunder of 
the war, and living so near they shifted over to themselves 
all the movable property {KaraaKevrjv) of Attica, down to 
the timber and tiles of the houses. At that time the land 
of the Athenians was in a better state than any in Greece, 
for it had suffered little in the raids, and had been developed 
and worked by the Athenians to such an extent that . . .** 
and here the pap5n:us fails us. 
, ^ Aristophanes, Knights (year 424), 793. ^ Hellenica Oxyvhynchia, 12, 3 . 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 133 

Hitherto the corn route had been from Byzantium, along 
the north coast of the Propontis, out of the Dardanelles, 
picking up the islands (always essential to Athens) Imbros, 
Lemnos, and Scyros, to Euboea, then across the island and 
over the Euripos, and by land from Oropus through Attica 
to Athens. That way was now blocked by the Deceleian 
garrison, and the ships had to round Sunium with constant 
risk (after the destruction of the Athenian fleet) from privateers 
and pirates.^ The cost of everything rose, and at the same 
time coin and the precious metals in any form became scarcer 
and scarcer, till at last temple treasures and votive offerings 
had to be minted, and so Athens had her first gold coinage, 
" using the Victories for the war." ^ Taxation, liturgies, 
trierarchies — there was no end to it. 

With the enemy so near there was garrison duty night 
and day, and the habit of carrying weapons, which had long 
been dropped in Athens,^ began again perforce.* Aristophanes 
makes fun of it — or at least Lysistrata does to the Proboulos : ^ 

Lysistrata. Now in the market you see them like Corybants 
jangling about with their armour of mail. 
Fiercely they stalk in the midst of the crockery, sternly parade 
by the cabbage and kail. 
Proboulos. Right, for a soldier should always be soldierly ! 
Lysistrata. Troth, 'tis a mighty ridiculous jest, 
Watching them haggle for shrimps in the market-place, grimly 
accoutred with shield and with crest. 
Stratyllis. Lately I witnessed a captain of cavalry, proudly 
the while on his charger he sat. 
Witnessed him, soldierly, buying an omelet, stowing it all in his 

cavalry hat. 
Comes, like a Tereus, a Thracian irregular, shaking his dart and 

his target to boot ; 
Off runs a shop-girl, appalled at the sight of him, down he sits, 
soldierly, gobbles her fruit. 

The contrast with the usual peaceful unconcern of Athenian 
life is signal.® 

War is " a violent teacher," as Thucydides said,' and these 

1 Thuc. vii. 27, 28. 2 Aristophanes, Frogs, 720 ; C.I.A. i. 140. 

3 Thuc. i. 6. * Thuc. vii. 28. 

^ Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 557-564 (B. B. Rogers). 

• Cf. Demosthenes, Midias, 221. 

' Thuc. iii. 82, 2. See Chapter III. p. 71. 



134 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

were some of its lessons. It is not surprising that the Athenian 
temper grew sharper, that the avroha^ rpoiro^, the " bite- 
at-sight habit," ^ grew more and more nervous and irritable. 
There was no mercy for generals who failed — Laches, Paches, 
Eurymedon, or Thucydides. Nicias was afraid to come back 
beaten from Sjnracuse, though to bring away what he could 
of the beaten forces and fleet was the only patriotism. The 
generals after Arginusae are an even more outstanding 
illustration. 

One bad example the Peloponnesians set, which caused 
great irritation and was copied. Early in the war they began 
capturing trading vessels, oX/caSe?, and killing the traders, 
whether Athenians, or Athenian allies, or neutrals. ^ The 
Samian delegates told one Spartan admiral '* he had an ill 
manner of liberating Hellas, if he put to death men who were 
not his enemies, and were not lifting a hand against him, but 
were allies of Athens from necessity.' ' ^ Then came reprisals 
in kind. The Mitylene massacre was indeed countermanded, 
but Melos was andrapodized, the adult men killed, the 
women and children sold off to dealers for the slave-markets 
and iropvelaoi the Mediterranean.* The Aeginetans, expelled 
from their island, and settling in the Thyreatis, were raided, 
and the captives taken to Athens and killed there " for the 
hatred they had always had to them from of old.'* ^ Finally 
before Aegospotami it was resolved to cut the right hand off 
every man captured on a Peloponnesian trireme — ^he should 
row no more. 6 To his credit the general, Adeimantos, spoke 
against it. Of two triremes, a Corinthian and an Andrian, 
which they took, they drove the crews over a precipice. 

Then came the final blow, and the memory with it of the 
precedents they had set. Let Xenophon, who grew up in the 
Athens of the war, and must have been there, tell us what 
he saw. 

^ Aristophanes, Peace, 607. ^ Xhuc. ii. 67. ^ Thuc. iii. 32. 

* Thuc. V. 116. This kilUng and enslaving of a whole city is discussed 
by Plato and deprecated in the case of Greek against Greek ; Greek 
against barbarian is another story — ^they are natural enemies, and war 
between them is not orao-ts, as between Greeks who are by nature 
friends. Rep. 469B-470C. To understand what it meant, the modern 
reader had better look up the treatment of Chios by the Turks in 1822. 

^ Thuc. iv. 57, 4. * Xen. Hellenica, ii. i, 31, 32. 



ATHENS IN THE WAR-TIME 135 

** It was night when the Paralos vessel came, and the 
disaster was told in Athens ; and wailing came up from 
Peiraieus between the Long Walls to the city, every man 
telling the next. So that, that night, no man slept, wailing 
not only for the lost but still more for themselves, thinking 
they must themselves suffer what they had done to the Melians, 
who were colonists of the Spartans, when they took them by 
siege, and to the people of Histiaea, of Scione, of Torone, of 
Aegina, and many others of the Greeks.'* All through the 
siege of Athens, as Xenophon shows us, this thought came 
back again and again — that Athens must suffer what she had 
inflicted on the little cities. ^ 

She did not suffer it ; but let us ask ourselves how and 
why it is that we forgive her all the wrong she made others 
suffer, and do not forgive those who even thought of inflicting 
as much on her again. 

^ The story is taken up in Chapter VI. p. 189, 



CHAPTER V 
EURIPIDES 

BIOGRAPHY is never an easy task— least of all when its 
subject is a poet. With care we may track him down, 
till we can account for almost every month of his 
life — with date and place exactly given — and then when 
we have found him where impressions must have come 
most vividly, he tells us that all the time he was thinking 
of something else — he had 

A strangeness in the mind, 
A feeling that I was not for that hour 
Nor for that place. 

And we discover that amid what would most have impressed 
us, he was 

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. 

But when our subject is a poet of the ancient world, we are less 

likely to make a true biography. Yet the ancient poet lived a 

life — lived it among men at a certain time and in a certain place ; 

and whatever strange seas of thought he voyaged through, 

sometimes we know the port from which he started and can 

guess the haven which he tried to make, and sometimes, if 

we know contemporary history, we can divine how it was that 

this or that came to be marked so emphatically upon his chart. 

Euripides, men said, was born on the very day of the battle 

of Salamis, and on the island of Salamis — on the day which 

marks the beginning of a new era for all Greeks, and he of all 

men most definitely belongs to the new age. On Salamis he 

lived as a man for a good deal of his time, we are told ; and 

perhaps he grew up there. What is that makes a childhood ? 

What was it to grow up on a little estate that perhaps lay near 

the scene of the great fight ? When he looked back, did he 

remember wrecks of Phoenician galleys, dropping slowly to 

pieces upon the beach — strange trophies, cups of Eastern 

136 



EURIPIDES 137 

workmanship, swords and armour of no pattern Greeks ever 
saw again, kept in the houses of the Salaminians — each with its 
story ? ^ Do we reaHze how often memory is three generations 
deep, and what this means to an imaginative child ? Was 
he told tales of the great war ? He must have heard them — 
of Marathon and Hippias, and Pisistratus. And there would 
be slaves in the houses round about — who came on the great 
Armada from the utmost ends of the earth, and were taken by 
the victorious Greeks and sold ; and the boy made friends with 
them, men and women, and they told him what it was to be 
sold in a strange land — hither or thither, where they did 
not know — Sparta, Sicily, Athens — the gods only knew, 
and perhaps they did not care. 

Who am I that I sit 

Here at a Greek king's door, 
Yea, in the dust of it ? 

A slave that men drive before, 
A woman that hath no home. 

Weeping alone for her dead ; 

A low and bruised head. 
And the glory struck therefrom. ^ 

Such stories, and worse ones, told in a foreigner's halting 
Greek ^ to a sensitive child formed the reverse of the glorious 
tales of victory he learnt from parents and kinsmen, from the 
freemen and the conquerors. Grown people know that 

things like this must be 
In every famous victory, 

but the child asks, Why ? and when he is told to be silent, 
he asks himself the question ; and if Nature has planned a 
poet in him, the unanswered question may never cease to work. 
Such things must have lain at the door for the open eyes of the 
Greek child, Euripides, and they haunted his life. 

Then came boyhood and books, and the choice of a life. 
Legend says he wished to be a painter — a strange choice. 

^ If evidence is needed, Pericles speaks (Thuc. ii. 13, 4) of a-KvXa 
MijbiKo. Koi €1 Ti ToiovTOTpoTTov ,* aud thc iuvcntories of the treasures 
in the Parthenon between 422 and 418 b.c. (Hicks and Hill, Greek 
Inscr., No. 66) include six aKtvaKai ireplxpva-oi, Persian swords. Cf. 
Herodotus, vii. 190; viii. 8, 96; ix. 80. 

2 Troades, 138 (Professor Gilbert Murray). 

' Aristophanes shows us how foreign slaves stumbled in Greek. 



138 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

" No youth of parts," says Plutarch, " because he saw the 
Zeus of Olympia, would wish therefore to be a Pheidias." ^ 
Euripides came of a good family — a-cj^oBpa evyevayv — and 
in spite of his lifelong interest in the arts, he never became 
painter or sculptor. He never took to public life, like 
Sophocles ; he never was called to command on the deck of a 
trireme nor to draft a constitution for his country ; he was 
not wanted. When he served as a soldier, for he probably had 
to serve in his turn, unless luck sent him to Egypt or Cyprus, 
it was probably against Greeks he had to fight. If he served in 
Egypt by any chance, it was an awful lesson he learnt of the 
meaning of war.^ But this is all conjecture. There was war 
enough for him to see, and prisoners of war on sale in the slave- 
market, where he could see what has always been seen in slave- 
markets. He seems to have gone back to private life — to his 
books. Athenaeus ^ names him among some half-dozen men 
of the days before the Pergamene kings, who were famous 
for their great libraries, and two of these were tyrants in 
their time. A hundred years after his death it was 
said that his favourite study was a cave on the island of 
Salamis that fronted the sea ; " from which cause also he draws 
the greater part of his similes from the sea." * That is natural 
enough, and what a picture it suggests of the man, with the 
worn face that we know and remember from the portrait busts, 
reading his philosophers in the quiet place, till tired and 
perplexed he lays down his book and looks at the sea and the 
birds. Those glimpses of the sea and of the birds come back 
in his poetry, till one can almost smell the sea and watch the 
birds. To this we must return. 

A poet in the fifth century, deeply read in the books of 
the philosophers, full of the sense of the beauty and wonder 
of the world, sea and land, perplexed too by human life — 
where else could he find that opening for the expression of 
himself that Tragedy gave ? No other mode of poetry offered 

^ Pericles, 2. 

2 In the Athenian expedition that failed, 459-454 B.C. 

* Athenaeus, i. p. 3. For a contemporary Ubrary, see Xen. Mem. 
iv. 2, I, the young Euthydemos ypafifMara ttoXXcc avveiX^yfievov 'jtoli)t5>v 
re Koi a-o(pL(rra)v r&v evdoKifKOTciTcov. 

* Aulus Gellius quotes the story from Philochorus, N.A. xv. 20, 5. 
Cf. Vita, 59 ff. 



EURIPIDES 139 

such scope for the utterance of the strange conflict that the 
sentient spirit knows in such times : 

Now believing, 
Now disbelieving ; endlessly perplexed 
With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground 
Of obligation, what the rule and whence 
The sanction. 

There is so much that seems sound and true, and in sheer 
contrast and opposition stands as much. The spirit is torn this 
way and that in the war of good with good, and right with right. 
And the feeHng grows and deepens that if all this could but 
find expression, matters would be helped forward — as if once 
the problem were fairly stated, the solution would be something 
nearer. It was in some such mood, one would suppose, that 
Goethe said that man is not born to solve the problem of the 
universe but to find out wherein it consists. 

So to Tragedy Euripides turned, and from 455 when he was 
some twenty-five years of age till his death in 406, he spent 
his life in writing plays for the festivals of Athens. Sometimes, 
it is more than likely, his plays were not presented. Five 
times in these years he was awarded the prize, which often fell 
to Sophocles. Other and lesser men eclipsed him — in 415 
*' Xenocles, whoever he may have been," as an ancient writer 
puts it, produced a play that won the prize against the Troades. 
Other things he wrote, we are told — an ode for Alcibiades 
when three of his chariots were '* placed " at Olympia in 416^ — 
an epitaph for the Athenians who fell at Syracuse.^ But he 
was not popular in a general sense — ^he was attacked furiously 
by Aristophanes, and he felt the ill will of his fellow-citizens, 
and at last left Athens, as Aeschylus did sixty years before, 
never to return. He went to the court of King Archelaos of 
Macedon, and there at seventy he wrote the Bacchae, the play 
of all his plays where men find most the note of freedom and 
escape — escape from the sea and its storms, the haven reached 
and toils ended. So indeed it proved. Two years later he 
died and was buried in the strange land of refuge (406).^ 

Yet his life had not been one without friendship and 
recognition. The invitation of King Archelaos was one proof 

1 Plut. Alcib. II. Cf. Chapter IV. p. 1 17. 

» Plut. mcias, 17. 8 Cf. Chapter III. p. 68. 



140 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

of this. But other proof was forthcoming in a strange quarter, 
for when the Syracusan expedition came to its horrible end 
and " of the many who went forth few returned home,'*^ of 
these survivors "no small number," we read, "greeted 
Euripides with warmth, and told, some, how, when enslaved, 
they had been set free for teaching all they knew of his poetry, 
and others, how, as they wandered about after the battle, they 
were given food and water for singing his songs.'* ^ 

Many such, he said. 
Returning home to Athens, sought him out, 
The old bard in the sohtary house. 
And thanked him ere they went to sacrifice.^ 

It is a remarkable testimony to the wide appeal of Euripides 
to the Greek world at large, and it may serve to explain the 
extraordinary vigour with which Aristophanes assailed him. 
For it suggests a fairly close acquaintance of the Athenian 
people in general with his plays, even if they did not give him 
prizes, and a good deal of verbal memory of his dramas. It 
also explains how Aristophanes can parody him so much and 
yet hope to reach his audience with his misquotations. 

In three plays which survive Aristophanes has introduced 
Euripides as a character and always in the same spirit. Through 
the whole of his criticism may be felt a hatred that is not less 
real for being tinged by fascination. For Aristophanes was 
himself attacked on the stage " for mocking Euripides and 
then imitating him.'' * It is not admiration, but he cannot 
keep his mind off him. Standing with the middle class and 
farmer party, a conservative in grain as became a young 
gentleman of parts, he mistrusted the whole democratic 
movement of the day — the downgrade tendencies in art, 
philosophy, politics, and religion ; and he saw clearly enough 
that the cause was one and the same, the spirit of criticism. 
The leaders in this disruption of society were obviously 
Euripides and Socrates ; the Cleons and sausage-sellers stood 
on a lower plane. So to Euripides and Socrates he devoted 
himself. He was shrewd enough to see that to meet them on 
their own ground would be to concede the whole position. 
Criticism, if met by argument, would have secured its own 

^ Thuc. vii. end. ^ piut. Nicias, 29, 2. 

® Balaustwn's Adventure. * Schol. Plato, p. 330 (Bekker) A. 



EURIPIDES 141 

ends. He would attack from ground of his own choosing 
and drive them off the field. This is the weakness of his 
polemic, that he does not attempt, and does not intend, to 
assail his enemy's centre. Every kind of flank movement — 
witty, vicious, shameful — ^he will try ; and if he cannot laugh 
them out of a hearing and perhaps out of Athens, it will be a 
pity. But controversy is never successful in the long run, 
unless the enemy's centre is broken. Aristophanes succeeded 
with his contemporaries, with those, at least, who preferred 
" the unexamined life," with those who still prefer it ; but 
the forward movement of the human mind is not to be held 
up by banter, even if it is banter of genius. 

Aristophanes began with Euripides' books and his mother. 
The Tragic poet got his ideas out of other men's books — to an 
audience that read little the charge of " bookishness " would 
appeal ; and his mother sold vegetables. What lies behind 
this charge we do not know, but the joke never grew stale, 
and it receives many forms, some of them witty. This style 
of abuse and the number of years over which it was spread 
suggest that if in the Thesmophoriazusae (of 411 B.C.) Aristo- 
phanes had no vilification for the wife of Euripides, either to 
quote or to invent, the mean tales of a later day may be 
dismissed. 

When Aristophanes fairly comes to Euripides himself, 
his criticism turns upon his art and his philosophy — ^proper 
subjects for criticism in any case. As for his art, Euripides was 
spoiling Tragedy ; the legends he chose for treatment were 
better left to be forgotten, and his methods of treating them 
were aesthetically ridiculous. Hero and demigod come upon 
his stage in rags and tatters ; they talk out of books, about 
anything, whether suited to the tragic stage or not — and they 
talk at such length, too, in their long debates ; they use 
language that is modern, subtle, and trifling, nothing like the 
diction of Aeschylus — quibbling, hair-splitting jargoners, one 
and all of them. His plays cannot go of themselves ; they 
need a prologue of explanation, always constructed on the 
same humdrum lines, and beginning with the same type of 
sentence. He always attacks women — as if he needed to ; 
as if honest women didn't go home and drink hemlock for 
very shame at his plays. Lastly, the music is all modem and 



142 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

undignified. Perhaps the happiest stroke in all this is the 
choric ode in the Frogs, where " Aeschylus " burlesques the 
Euripidean style in a song of stolen poultry — awful with 
Night, dark-gleaming, and the soul-less soul of a dead phantom, 
a thing to be expiated, and then the terrible discovery that the 
bird is gone, and Nymph and scullery-maid, and the Cretans, 
Ida's children and Dictynna, are all invoked in passionate 
phrase with duplicated words and trilled syllables to find and 
bring back the lost bird. 

On Art, Euripides was liable to attack, as Aristophanes 
saw, for he occupied a half-way position. The tragic mode was 
old — the type of legend to be treated was fixed, the chorus was 
an established necessity, and each had become an embarrass- 
ment to the poet. He needed more freedom and he might not 
have it. The ideas and the outlook on life were new, and not 
easy to adapt to the old framework, but it had to be done. The 
much parodied prologue was an attempt to relieve things. 
The chorus was a terrible difficulty — a dozen or fifteen persons 
always present, to overhear every secret on which the plot 
turns and not to reveal them. It must be owned that Euri- 
pides, tied to this necessity, turned it after all to good purpose. 
Such odes as those in the Hippolytus (1. 731) and the Troades 
(1. 794) have a wonderful psychological effect, placed as they 
are, in varying the emotional pitch ^-^on the variation of 
which so much in a play depends — and in giving the mind and 
heart of reader and spectator at least a hint of where the clue 
is to be found which shall lead to peace. 

When Aristophanes attacked Euripides' philosophy, he was 
at once on safer ground and less secure. It was safer because 
he had his audience more entirely with him — they understood 
and they approved. But the criticism is essentially external, 
and there it breaks down. Aristophanes charges Euripides 
with teaching atheism, sophistry, and immorality. Zeus is 
driven out and Aether takes his place. The prayer of Euripides 
in the Frogs is not to the gods men know and recognize, like 
the honourable and dignified address which Aeschylus makes 

^ I borrow Mr. A. C. Bradley's phrase from one of those discussions 
of Shakespeare, which I have found more helpful for the understand- 
ing of Greek drama than much which has been written directly 
about it. 



EURIPIDES 143 

to Demeter ; they are gods of a " brand-new coinage/' 
" private gods " : 

Aether whereon I batten ! Vocal chords ! 
Reason, and nostrils swift to scent and sneer. 
Grant that I duly probe each word I hear.^ 

Why Earth should be a legitimate deity and Aether not, 
it would be hard to say, if Air had not been playing a large 
part in contemporary speculations as to the nature of the soul 
and of God. But to come to human life and conduct, all this 
emphasis on Phaedras and Stheneboias could only mean im- 
morality ; and a famous line in the Hippolytus definitely taught 
perjury and justified it — " the tongue has sworn : the mind 
remains unsworn." The last few lines of the trial scene be- 
tween Aeschylus and Euripides may stand as an example of 
the whole. The god Dionysos, at whose festival the tragedies 
were played, has gone down into Hades to fetch up Euripides, 
but in a succession of parodies things go otherwise. 

Dion. My tongue hath sworn ; but I'll choose Aeschylus. 

Eur. What have you done, you traitor ? 

Dion. I ? I've judged 

That Aeschylus gets the prize. Why shouldn't I ? 

Eur. Canst meet mine eyes, fresh from thy deed of shame ? 

Dion. What is shame, that the . . . Theatre deems no shame ? 

Eur. Hard heart ! You mean to leave your old friend dead ? 

Dion. Who knoweth if to live is hut to die ? 
If breath is bread, and sleep a woolly lie ? ^ 

And that is the end of Euripides. Who knows if life be not 
death ? Let him stay dead. 

Tragedy was the work of Euripides, but as Plato said 
Tragedy and Comedy came from the same hand, and the man 
who made the one could make the other. ^ The Tragic poet 
had Satyric dramas on which to show what he could do with 
a lighter touch. Till lately but one Satyric drama survived, 
so that to generalize or to particularize from it is dangerous. 
But if the style and manner of the Cyclops are partly traditional, 
none the less it is true that Euripides here saw his chance and 

1 Frogs, 892 (Professor Murray's translation). IdioiTais deols is the 
phrase preceding. 

2 Professor Murray's translation. I have italicized the quotations. 
* Plato, Symposium, 223 c, d. 



144 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

took it. In this play Odysseus — not the mahgn figure of 
Tragedy, but a nobler Odysseus nearer the Homeric — is con- 
fronted with Cyclops, Silenus, and Satyr, who, it appears, 
have every taste and instinct of the average hero of an 
Aristophanic comedy. They are frankly sensual, thoroughly 
gluttonous, rank cowards, cruel and superstitious ; and their 
outlook on life is that which Plato drew in Callicles in the 
Gorgias — the spirit that made the Melian massacre, and many 
other shameful deeds. The humour is grim. 

Hatred led Aristophanes to lay his finger on the two main- 
springs of the thought of Euripides — if so mechanical a meta- 
phor may be used of thought — passion and question. As we 
study the man with the closer attention of those who love him, 
we find here as elsewhere that passion and question are not to 
be severed. They act and react upon each other, and it is 
perhaps passion that calls question into being. 

Wer nie sein Brod mit Tranen ass, 

Wer nie die kummervolle Nachte 

Auf seinem Bette weinend sass, 

Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Machte. 

Whatever it be with philosophers, with poets philosophy is 
the child of pain. They feel 

The heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world, 

and feeling it they are more apt to get aright the first elements 
of the problem. 

'Tis not the calm and tranquil breast 
That sees and reads the problem true. 
They only know on whom 't has prest, 
Too hard to hope to solve it too. 

So Goethe and two of our own great poets tell us, and it is 
true of the rest. Of Euripides, Nestle says that " passionate 
feeling is the ultimate source of all his criticism." ^ 

*' There is great confusion,'' says his Orestes, " among things 
divine, yes, and mortal affairs too.'* ^ it is the complaint we 
remember that Hamlet made. There is a want of certainty, 
where most of all certainty should be, about the gods and all 
that concerns them.^ 

1 Nestle, Euripides, p. 26. ^ jp^^ Taur. 572. ^ Eur. H.F. 62. 



EURIPIDES 145 

O Zeus ! what shall I say ? that thou seest men ? 
Or that they hold this doctrine all in vain, 
And Chance rules everything among mankind ? ^ 

What is one to say ? Euripides went to his books — in a passion 
to know the truth ; and there he found many things written, 
and much that interested him, for it came back into his mind 
at moments when we should not have expected it, and finds 
expression from the lips of the characters in his plays. They 
too have a speculative habit — and this in a higher degree than 
we should be apt to think in our current judgments of ordinary 
people. But perhaps Euripides is nearer the truth — and 
ordinary people do touch the deep questions under stress of 
pain. Much then that was in the books breaks out — curiously, 
as some would say ; naturally, as others would have it — from 
the lips of men and women in the plays. Most of all the last 
word in the books — for the saying of Xenophanes — 

86kos S' eVt TracTi rirvKrai — 

that guess-work is over all, seems terribly like the conclusion 
of the whole matter. And yet it cannot be ; there must be 
truth, and it must be found somehow. Euripides will not be 
satisfied to guess ; he must know. Meantime he seems to 
sway this way and that — that is, if we follow the plan of 
Aristophanes and take every dramatic utterance in any play 
as the poet's own, which is bad criticism as a rule. Here it 
is more tolerable, one feels. If the character says this or 
the other thing, the poet has felt it at some time. We reach 
the conclusion that Euripides is not a man with a system or 
a dogma. His heart has been the battle-ground of many 
thoughts, and his very face in the portrait bust shows it. Like 
such men, he is full of contradictions — ^he loves to question, and 
is weary of it and longs for certainty. But it cannot be found ; 
so we will give up the quest ; yes, let us give it up — which 
means, we will go on with it. 

Philosophers with their guesses stand on this side ; and on 
the other side are priests and mystics with their certainties. 
Shall it be rationalism or mysticism ? But rationalism leaves 
so much unexplained, and mysticism frankly leaves the 
facts behind ; and no system yet manages, however it is, to 

1 Eur. Hec. 488. 
10 



146 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

catch the real smell and sound and colour of the sea, for instance. 
There it is, on the beach below, and the sea-birds are busy 
over it, and everywhere in the rocks above him is the noise of 
the broods in the nests. Has not the sea something to say ? 
But the philosophers have their eyes on elements and causes, 
and the mystics with their eyes shut are preaching abstinence 
from flesh and a number of abstract notions. Then there is 
life and its confusions — what heals them ? Not " conjecture 
that is over all." Can it be the mystics have something to 
say here ? 

"Surely," the chorus sings in the Hippolytus} "surely 
with power do the thoughts of the gods, when they come into 
my heart, take away sorrow ; but ^vveaiv he nv ekirihi Kevdeov 
— [let us leave the Greek untranslated for a moment] — I faint, 
as I look on the chances that fall to men and on the deeds they 
do ; it is confusion, all, and life passes away for men, full of 
wandering and change for ever." 

It is the old problem as to action and consequence. Good 
should come to the good, and evil to the evil, if the gods are 
just ; but it does not happen so, — at least so far as we see, — 
and the heart sinks within a man. But let us look at the 
untranslated phrase, which is rather obscure — " concealing 
some (tlvo) understanding with hope " might be a clumsy 
literal translation. One wonders what he means. I cannot 
help thinking it is something like this. There is understanding 
of a sort, which goes to a certain point, which sees things so 
far clearly enough — even too clearly ; things fall amiss, per- 
plexingly ; understanding gives out, and we are left stranded ; 
and then hope suggests another way of it. But is it possible 
that hope is only a coloured glass, after all, which confuses 
what understanding shows us so plainly — that it is merely 
a form of wishing things to be other than they are ? What 
right has wishing to impose its fancies on the facts of under- 
standing ? Ah ! but it does ; and then the poet looks at the 
facts again, and they are hard and unintelligible still. Whether 
this rendering of the passage is sound or not, it seems to me 
to represent the attitude of Euripides to life. There stand 
the facts, and the whole heart cries out for — it hardly knows 

^ Hippolytus, 1103-1110. Professor Murray's translation of the 
phrase left in Greek I cannot believe to be right. 



EURIPIDES 147 

what ; for a life beyond the grave, perhaps, where things shall 
be mended, where at least severed kindred and parted friends 
may meet — for gods who care for men. The mystics held 
out hopes of both ; they trafficked in hopes. And Euripides 
saw painfully that hope is after all — hope. Thus far the facts 
take him ; hope suggests one more step, but he will go no 
further than he sees the facts go. His heart feels the wrench 
— the pull of things beyond the line, but at the line he stops. 
That is characteristic. It is the struggle of the great, deep, 
sentient, human-hearted poet with his own awful, irresistible 
logic ; and because it is such a struggle that appears in all his 
work, he remains the poet of all time, for in every age the old 
struggle goes on between what the understanding categorically 
says IS and what the heart insists must be. 

Aristophanes declares roundly that Euripides in his tragedies 
taught men and women that there are no gods. It would be 
fairer to say that Bellerophon in anguish cries out that there 
are none. For when we turn to the plays we find plenty of 
gods and goddesses in them ; and yet Aristophanes is in a 
sense right. Professor Verrall's well-known books would suggest 
that Euripides can have thought of little but polemic against 
the gods. This I do not at all believe. Yet there is criticism 
of a most penetrative character. Throughout antiquity from 
Plato to the Christian apologists we find that the main source 
of criticism of the traditional gods was moral feeling. Already 
in Homer the heroes, mortal men as they are, stand on a higher 
moral plane than the gods ; and while a moral progress is 
marked in the thinking of the Greek world, the gods of popular 
tradition never caught up with the better and purer natures 
of actual men. They were left behind ; and when men thought 
of them they conceived them to be actuated by motives 
beneath those of the purer spirits among their fellows — by 
love of power, lust, spite, and the sheer fancy to use their 
half-omnipotence in an arbitrary way. Against this view 
thinkers had long been in revolt, and if it was atheism in 
Euripides to let one of his characters cry : 

If gods do deeds of shame, the less gods they ! 

then something must be said of Aeschylus and Pindar, who 
were careful to reject legends which told of ill-deeds done by 



148 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

gods 1 — legends which none the less lived on as before. The 
outlook of Euripides is different. He will not mend, but end 
the legends ; and he does it in a way of his own. 

Euripides presents the traditional gods very much as 
tradition gave them. The usages and conventions of the Attic 
stage lent themselves to this. But by setting the old gods 
with their old instincts and their old deeds in a new milieu, 
and above all by letting them utter in words the impulses that 
moved them to do those deeds, he effected a tacit criticism 
of the most significant. The new milieu is that of human 
suffering ; and anything more irrelevant to these old gods, 
especially with their new and Euripidean frankness, could not 
be conceived. Here they speak and act — doing no more 
than tradition said. Athena wrecked the Greek fleet on its 
voyage from Troy. So in the Troades she discusses her motives 
and her plans with Poseidon, and he accepts all. Now, taken 
in themselves, the motives are pitiful and devilish, and the 
plans mean death to hundreds of innocent creatures — and one 
of these gods actually pictures these people lying drowned all 
along the shore of Euboea. That is tradition — not innova- 
tion at all ; it all happened so, and if the gods discussed 
it, it must have been in this way. But to conceive of them 
discussing it at all was innovation — still more so, to conceive 
of them doing it while full in front of them and beneath them 
Queen Hecuba lay in the dust, a widow, a captive, a slave. 
Of course everybody knew her story ; only one had not thought 
of these things together — the spite of Athena, the cold-blooded 
stupidity of Poseidon, and the misery of Hecuba. Certain 
ideas depend on our thinking in compartments ; and the 
removal of the dividing wall is criticism. 

Or take another case. Greek legend was full of demigod 
heroes, splendid figures of romance and adventure, sons in 
each case of a mortal woman and a god. Here is an instance 
which shows how Pindar handled such a tale.^ 

" But Euadne beneath a thicket's shade put from her her 
silver pitcher and her girdle of scarlet web, and she brought 
forth a boy in whom was the spirit of God. By her side the 
gold-haired god set kindly Eleithuia and the Fates, and from 

1 Cf. Chapter II. p. 42. 

2 Pindar, Olympian, 6, 39-44, 53-56 ; lamos as if from hv. 



EURIPIDES 149 

her womb in easy travail came forth lamos to the light." She 
left him there, and then her husband came from Delphi and 
asked for the child, for the god himself had told him it was 
the son of Phoebus and should be a prophet. But none 
knew, '* though he was now five days born. For he was hidden 
among rushes in an impenetrable brake, his tender body all 
suffused with golden and deep purple gleams of pansy-flowers ; 
wherefore his mother prophesied that by this holy name of 
immortality he should be called throughout all time.'* 

What a beautiful picture Pindar makes of it — lovely words, 
and colours gleaming. And what a squalid story it was ! 
In the Ion Euripides tells the same story of the same god and 
another woman, Creusa of Athens. Creusa is the teller, twice, 
once in the third person to Ion — how a woman, one of her 
friends (it is herself, of course), lay with a god, with Phoebus, 
and bore him a child ; and her father never knew ; and she 
exposed it, and it disappeared — perhaps the wild beasts 
destroyed it — she never knew ; though she came again and 
searched the place over and over, she found no clue ; it was 
gone.i Later on she tells it in the first person ; she had not 
consented, she says, but Apollo had his way ; and then '' I 
bore him a child " ; and " he is dead, exposed to the beasts." 
** Dead ? " says her listener, " and the false Apollo (0 Kaico<i) 
never helped ? " "He did not help ..." " Who exposed 
the child ? " "I did it, in the darkness, wrapped in swaddling 
clothes." *' But how couldst thou bear to leave thy child 
in the cave ? " "If thou hadst seen the baby reach his hands 
to me ... I thought the god would save his own son." ^ 

O Athens, what thy cHff hath seen ! 
It saw the ravished maiden's pang, 
The babe she bore to Phoebus there 
Cast to the talon and the fang, 
There, on the same insulting scene ! 

Of any born 
'Twixt god and man none ever sang, 
None ever told but tales forlorn. 

O Athens, what thy cliff hath seen ! * 

So sings the chorus, and at the play's end Apollo sends Athena 
to put all right — he would not come himself, said the sister 

^ Ion, 330-352. 2 /^^^ 940-960 (abridged). 

' Ion, 500-508 (Dr. Verrall's translation, or paraphrase rather). 



150 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

goddess, " lest there should be reproach for what is past.'* ^ It is 
always the same with the traditional gods — they are not touched 
by moral considerations ; they have no regard for human feel- 
ing ; they are beyond good and evil. And the sacrifices and 
the offerings, the temples and the ceremonies and the festivals — 

My heart, my heart crieth, O Lord Zeus on high, 
Were they all to thee as nothing, thou throned in the sky, 
Throned in the fire-cloud, where a City, near to die, 
Passeth in the wind and the flare ? ^ 

It is the question of a captive Trojan woman in the Troades, 
and another answers : 

Dear one, O husband mine. 

Thou in the dim dominions 
Driftest with waterless lips 
Unburied ; and me the ships 
Shall bear o'er the bitter brine, 

Storm-birds upon angry pinions, 
Where the towers of the Giants shine 
O'er Argos cloudily. 
And the riders ride by the sea.^ 

Again, the same question : does human suffering touch the 
gods in their happiness ? If it does not, are they gods ? 

Ah ! but ! said the Orphic teachers, this is to look at 
things from outside ; the gods may be known better and 
understood. So to the Orphics Euripides listened, and we 
can gather his conclusion from one or two allusions. They 
practised abstinence. ** Go now," cries the angry Theseus to 
his son, " go and boast, and with thy life- less food, juggle with 
thy meats ; have Orpheus for thy king, and revel, honouring the 
smoke of many books ; for thou art taken ! Such I bid all 
men flee ; for they hunt with words of awe, and foulness is in 
their thoughts." * The Satyrs in the den of the Cyclops will 
not help Odysseus to twirl the flaming stake into the giant's 
one eye — " but I know a charm of Orpheus, a very good one, 
whereby the brand of itself shall go to his skull and fire the 
one-eyed son of earth." ^ " Much have I dealt with the 
Muses," sings the chorus in the Alcestis, " and soared on high, 
and many a reason have I handled, but nought stronger than 

^ Ion, 1557. 2 Troades, 1076 i. (Murray). 

3 Troades, 108 1 f. (Murray). * Eur. Hippolytus, 952-957. 



Eur. Cyclops, 646. 



EURIPIDES 151 

Necessity have I found, neither potion in Thracian tablets, 
that sweet-voiced Orpheus wrote, nor amongst all that 
Phoebus gave to the sons of Asclepios." There is no cure for 
death ; Orphism alters no facts, and it reveals none. 

What, then, is the view of Euripides — if he has one — if he 
has several ? Is it possible that the gods of his plays — of 
some of his plays — are not merely figments of a foolish past, 
but symbols somehow of something that works in Nature ? 
Aphrodite, in the Hippolytus, what is she ? A cruel fiend- 
goddess — or the dark inexplicable force of passion that wrecks 
men and women upon one another in this world, the good 
turned to evil, the great principle that makes homes and 
happiness turned astray and crashing through human lives 
to no purpose ? Does she represent a force of nature, or a 
law of nature ? Artemis in the same play is more easily 
dealt with — she is the mystic's goddess, heard, but never seen, 
only known by a sweetness and a fragrance ; and she leaves 
him in the hour of disaster to face ruin alone — she will not 
save him, Euripides says ; and when death comes on him, and 
he is " near this evil," she must go ; she must not let her 
face be defiled with the breath of death. Such are the gods 
of the mystics, he seems to say. But blind brute forces of 
nature do not help us much. Does he go further ? 

He seems at times to lean to a doctrine associated with 
the name of Diogenes of Apollonia, who lived in Athens in 
his days — a doctrine that Air is the universal substance or 
being. " By means of air," says Diogenes, " all are steered, 
and over all air has power. For this very thing seems to me to 
be God, and I believe that it reaches to everything and dis- 
poses everything and is present in everything ; " and else- 
where he calls the air within us, that is, our reason, *' a little 
part of God." ^ Something very like this comes several 
times in Euripides : 

Seest thou the boundless aether there on high, 
That folds the earth around with dewy arms ? 
This deem thou Zeus, this reckon one with God.^ 

^ Cf. Adam, Vitality of Platonism, p. 44, from which I borrow the 
translation. The fragments of Diogenes are in Diels, Vorsokratiker, 
No. 51, and in Ritter and Preller, Nos. 164, 169. 

2 Eur. Frag. 941 ; translated by A. S. Way. 



152 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and in a lyric passage : 

Thee, self -begotten, who in aether rolled 

Ceaselessly round, by mystic links dost bind 

The nature of all things, whom veils enfold 

Of light, of dark night, flecked with gleams of gold, 

Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end.^ 

But it is to a passage in the Troades that scholars are apt 
to turn to find a fuller confession of faith. It is spoken by 
Hecuba when she learns that Menelaus will kill Helen, and so 
Troy will be avenged. There are editors who have cried out 
on the anachronism and general unlikeliness of Hecuba uttering 
so profoundly philosophical a prayer. Indeed, Menelaus, who 
is not very bright, notices as much — he thinks it a strange 
prayer ; and the editors remark that she does not explain 
it to him. Why should she ? He had had no lesson of pain 
to enable him to understand her — a commonplace successful 
man. 

stay of earth, who hast thy seat on earth. 
Whoe'er thou art, ill-guessed and hard to know, 
Zeus, whether Nature's law, or mind of man, 

1 pray to thee ; for on a noiseless path 

All mortal things by justice thou dost guide. ^ 

The " stay of earth " may be the air on which earth rests, 
with which the " mind of man " may be identical, for Diogenes 
and doubtless Euripides were influenced by Anaxagoras ; 
but let us remember that we are dealing with a great poet. 
If Zeus is aether, and if (as we shall shortly see) the human 
soul is also aether, we have a great kinship established. In 
any case earth needs a spiritual stay as well as air beneath it 
to uphold it, and so he conceives Zeus — the great Reality on 
whom earth and all its affairs rest — the great Reality visible 
in his creation ; his seat is on earth. And what is he ? He 
is hard to guess at, hard to know — our common experience ; 
but whether the great Law that is the force driving the vast 
whole, or of one substance with the human heart and mind — 
for V0V9 is not the one without the other — one thing stands 
out : His rule is Justice ; to Justice he guides all things, 
noiseless as his path may be. " There is no speech nor 
language, their voice is not heard." Something is reached here 
1 Eur. Frag, 593 ; translated by A. S. Way. ^ Troades, 884-888. 



EURIPIDES 153 

for the human soul — there is Justice in God. True, Hecuba's 
hope of seeing justice is quenched very soon — poor Hecuba ! 
but the poet sees further, and deeper, and in the long run, in 
pain and prosperity, or in spite of them, God's Justice is done. 
Justice is of the essence of things in a cosmos — it is " the 
Weltgeist, the World- Reason, immanent in the World, active 
in the spiritual and moral sphere as in the material — it lives 
and moves in the feeling and thinking and acting of every 
man, and in the infinite and imperishable universe (Weltall)." ^ 
It is a deeper doctrine than the Orphics taught of a god who 
measured things by their rituals. 

The passage we have been studying hints at the conception 
of the nature of the soul to which Euripides leaned. We 
have to remember that for the ancient world the modern 
antithesis of spirit and matter hardly existed. The Stoic 
conceived of the soul as material though subtle. St. Augustine 
tells us how hard he found it to think of God as spirit ; when 
he tried to think of God, he somehow thought of infinite but 
infinitely subtle matter. So that it is not strange if Euripides 
thought of the soul as aether — many Greeks of his day did. 
The epitaph on the Athenians who fell at Poteidaia in 432 
contains the lines : 

aWrjp fiefi (fxrvxas vneBexcraro crafiara be x^^^ 
Totvde' HoTeidaias 8* djKJ)! nvXas eXvdev,^ 

and in the Helena Euripides says much the same : 

Albeit the mind 
Of the dead live not, deathless consciousness 
Still hath it, when in deathless aether merged.^ 

This seems to suggest that there is no personal immortality. 
Nearly every one in his day, who believed in this and thought 
much about it, associated personal immortality with the 
transmigration of souls ; but it has been remarked that, 
though famihar with this teaching of Pythagoras, Euripides 
is not seriously interested in metempsychosis. His own 
attitude is seen in the lyric, rather curiously given to Phaedra's 
nurse : 

^ Nestle, Euripides, 146. 

* Hicks and Hill, Manual, No. 54 ; Arnold on Thuc. i. 6^. 

* Helena, 1014 (A. S. Way, altered by Dr. Adam). 



154 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

But if any far-off state there be 
Dearer than life to mortality ; 
The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof, 
And mist is under and mist above. 
And so we are sick for life, and cling 
On earth to this nameless and shining thing. 
For other life is a fountain sealed, 
And the deeps below us are unrevealed. 
And we drift on legends forever. ^ 

The great phrase is Bi aireipoa-vvrjv aXkov ^iotov, and it recurs 
in a fragment of another play — " For Hfe we know, but through 
inexperience of death every man fears to leave the light of 
the sun.'' All is dark beyond — the *' non-demonstration of 
the things below earth " means no knowledge. The heart 
may yearn, but once more the understanding says No. And 
yet he turns almost wistfully to one Orphic doctrine, in the 
famous line which Aristophanes parodied : 

Who knoweth if to live is but to die ? 
Tiff oidev el to ^t^v fiev icrri KorOaveiv. 

It is the doctrine of which Plato makes so much — the equation 
of soma and sema, the body the soul's temporary grave. 
But who knows ? 

Meantime to express the common feelings of men, relative 
to death, he uses their common language — what else is there 
for dramatist or thinker to do ? And behind the language 
once more stand the facts, and to the facts he goes — 

beivov yap ovhev rmv dvayKaicov /SporoTs ^ — 

nothing that is inevitable is strange or terrible. 

Whether wouldst thou I tell thee soft smooth lies. 

Or rough gaunt truths ? Speak, it is thine to choose.^ 

The man who asks such a question has chosen for himself. 

Back to the facts Euripides goes — the facts which a poet 
finds — living sentient facts that vibrate and strike harmonics 
in the human soul. " Every man of genius in a sense begins 
anew," it has been said, even if it is equally true that he 
uses all who have gone before him ; and Euripides starts 
anew, with the simple elemental experiences — of pain and 

^ Hippolytus, 191-197 (Professor Murray's translation), dva-spcoTes. 
2 Frag. 'Y^//•t7^. 757. ^ Frag. 1036. 



EURIPIDES 155 

beauty ; and in neither case will half-knowledge serve, for 
reconciliation is his business — the business of all poets. 
Poetry has twin roots in joy and pain — and God knows if 
they are not the same thing. 

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 

Euripides will drink the bitter cup to the dregs, as his Herakles 
does — 

I am full fraught with ills — no stowing more/ 

and Herakles thinks he will kill himself ; but at this hour 
there is a friend at his side, Theseus, full of love and friendship, 
full of respect for the hero whom he sees in the time of weak- 
ness, and of gratitude for old memories. And if pain is one 
of the foundation facts of life, friendship is another — let us 
remember that. So Euripides sees ; and the mood of Herakles 
changes — he will not shuffle out of life : 

But this it was I pondered, though woe- whelmed — 

* ■ Take heed lest thou be taxed with cowardice 

Somehow in leaving thus the light of day ! " 

For whoso cannot make a stand against 

These same misfortunes, neither could withstand 

A mere man's dart, oppose death, strength to strength. 

Therefore unto thy city I will go 

And have the grace of thy ten thousand gifts. 

There ! I have tasted of ten thousand toils 

As truly — never waived a single one. 

Nor let these runnings drop from out my eyes ! 

Nor ever thought it would have come to this — 

That I from out my eyes do drop tears ! Well ! 

At present, as it seems, one bows to fate. 

So be it ! 2 

The poet takes the same stand. Greek thought had 
always its tinge of melancholy, and he does not escape — and 
he does not try to escape. He will not blink the evil facts ; 
he studies them ; he is reproached with having portrayed 
the pathological on the stage, ^ so close does he keep to the 
evil fact. His standpoint is not the religious one of Aeschylus 
and Sophocles — it is as if he felt this would mean some 

^ H.F. 1245 (Browning's translation). 
^H.F. 1347-1358 (Browning). 

^ There is no doubt that he did. Cf. Frogs, 108 1, and the constant 
taunts of Aristophanes, 



156 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

obscuring of the facts, hope once more darkening under- 
standing — and his reconcihation must be a deeper one. So 
without the consolations of these two great poets, he grapples 
with pain and evil, and escapes no wound they can deal him. 
" A hidden harmony is better than an obvious," said Heraclitus 
a century before,^ and that hidden harmony Euripides will 
have. He does not quite find it, but there were certain things 
that made for it which he did find, and which remain. 

If he became, as he did, the chief poet after Homer of 
his race, it was in some measure because in him they could 
find a consolation, not elsewhere to be had. Here was a 
man who based himself on fact, and, unlike so many philoso- 
phers, was not steeled against pain, but deeply read in it — 
what did it mean for people who growingly felt the pain of life? 

Wir heissen euch hoffen ! 

That Virgil found him so congenial is no slight evidence of 
the power of this wonderful spirit. Every question that men 
ask, it has been said, Euripides raises — doubt, shame, pain, 
and the whole gamut — and yet he has something to say. 
And what he had to say shall end our present study. 

In the first place we may note again how Greece had 
tasted the sense of power — trebly, in her victory over the 
world, in her great national struggle against Persia, and in 
the sphere of thought ; and then how another generation, 
drunk with this same sense of power, abused its power and 
turned the human spirit's victory over the material world to 
wrong ends and fell into materialism ; how freedom from Persia 
and rule of the sea bred a new temptation, and Athens was in- 
fected with the contagion of a hard and selfish imperialism, 
while the teachers of thought became sophists and rhetoricians 
and trained the young in the glib graces of speech and rational- 
ism. Against all this decline the poet reacted — he knew the 
world too deeply to think the shallow thoughts of the day. 

Where men looked to material success and saw the value of 
comfort and prosperity, he came forward boldly and asserted 
the spiritual basis of life. The problem in Plato's Republic — 
the first problem — is to show that righteousness without reward 
is enough and is. not made better by reward — that we may 

•^ ^ Heraclitus, Frag. 47 (By water), dpixovii] dcfiavris <f>av€pTJg Kpeia-a-av. 



EURIPIDES 157 

praise ** the thing itself " irrespective of reward of good or ill, as 
men judge such things. Euripides does not put the matter 
quite in the same way ; a poet does not exactly summarize his 
*' lessons," and if we try to summarize them we shall be sure 
to miss some of them. But the trend of thought that is waked 
by a play is a poet's contribution to a man's growth. Here I 
turn to the play which has most influenced me myself. I read 
it, almost by accident, in 1903, and ** discovered " it — or, rather, 
it discovered me — found me out and made me ashamed. I 
had been standing too near the Athenians — the Athenians of 
Melos and Syracuse, and this play shown in 415, between Melos 
and Syracuse, one might say, came home to me ; and I knew 
I was wrong. I have learnt other things from it since. 

There are those who find the Troades a characterless play. 
It certainly has little plot — a series of episodes, all accentuating 
one thing — the problem of pain. Troy is taken — at the end of 
the play we see the flames shoot up and hear the walls fall. 
Meantime the business in hand before the Greeks embark is 
being done. The captive women — the queen and princesses 
among them — are being allotted to their new owners ; Polyxena 
is offered as a sacrifice at the grave of Achilles ; little Astyanax 
is killed. One after another the stages of this Via Dolorosa are 
reached. One figure stands out — the aged queen Hecuba. She 
has been lying in the dust, and is, we may suppose, a woe- 
begone spectacle enough ; she aches in sinew and limb ; and 
her heart is struck through with grief after grief. Everything 
falls upon her ; she bears the troubles of all and she feels all. But 
— and this point is sometimes overlooked — miserable as she is 
herself, the most unhappy of the group, she is the minister of hope 
to the sad women around Jier. A great spirit, and wonderfully 
tender, she is still capable of great action. Forget Hector, she 
says to Andromache ; forget my son (it is a mother who speaks). 

Honour thou 
The new lord that is set above thee now 
And make of thine own gentle piety 
A prize to win his heart. So shalt thou be 
A strength to them that love us, and — God knows. 
It may be — rear this babe among his foes. 
My Hector's child, to manhood and great aid 
For Ilion. ^ 

^ Troades, 692-698 (Murray's translation). 



158 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Throughout she strives to turn each sufferer's thoughts 
away from her own griefs — to get her to look at others — to 
nniversahze her sorrow (if we may use such a phrase) ; and 
here she sets her own motive before Andromache — the 
service of those who love us — 

cvcfypavels ^iXovs. 

Contrasted in the play with Hecuba — silently contrasted — 
are Menelaus and Athena — one of the world's successful men 
arid a victorious goddess. The goddess, as we have seen, is in 
a sense the very negation of all that a thoughtful mind could 
call God. Menelaus is simply successful — a nothing crowned 
with prosperity and victory by the aid of others. He has — and 
Hecuba is ; which means most ? Which is best ? Longinus, 
the finest of ancient critics, asks his reader whether, allowing 
that Homer blunders and Apollonius never slips, would you 
rather be Apollonius or Homer ? ^ Suppose we borrow his 
question, and ask, whether, allowing Menelaus to have all that 
an ordinary mind would ask in the way of success and prosperity 
and Hecuba to be stript of everything that makes life even 
tolerable, which would you rather be — Menelaus or Hecuba ? 
The poet does not ask this ; the reader asks it of himself. 
Would he — could he — wish to be Menelaus, to have all that 
heart could dream, and to be — Menelaus ? Never ! We choose 

Hecuba — misery, slavery, shame and all ; because Because 

Euripides is right ; the basis of life is spiritual, and, without 
talking about it, he has made us feel it. Callicles in the Gorgias 
and the Cyclops in the play can put the arguments on the other 
side ; but we have felt — and the case is settled ; we choose the 
deeper view. There are problems still to solve — the why of 
pain, and so forth — but instinctively we feel somehow that pain 
has made the difference — some of the difference — between 
Hecuba and Menelaus ; in any case we know now that there are 
things worth buying at the cost of pain. Here as in other 
instances Euripides shows us that life is spirit. 

This was running all against the prevailing currents of 
thought in Athens. Empire was the word ; and Pericles and 
Cleon after him had the practical man's irony for the idealists 
who felt things were wrong — " seeking something else, so to 

1 Longinus, Z3> 4- 



EURIPIDES 159 

say, than the terms on which we Hve." ^ There is no renoun- 
cing empire, " even if in the panic of the moment and through 
slackness any of you fancies playing the honest man." ^ So 
men are led to vote that Mitylenaeans and Melians shall be 
killed, and the wives and children of them sold into slavery. 
It is a clear straight vote given on intellectual conviction, un- 
harassed by emotion or afterthought or imagination ; the 
Empire requires it. 

It was in the year after the Melian affair that Euripides put 
the Troades on the stage. We have seen how Hecuba comforts 
Andromache with the thought that her little Astyanax may 
grow up and re-build Troy. It seems that the wise Odysseus 
was a little ahead of her there ; for, as she ceases to speak, 
Talthybius the herald enters. Odysseus had addressed the 
Greeks, much as Cleon or Pericles might have ; did they want 
a third siege of Troy — another ten years of it ? No ! Then 
what about Hector's son ? A baby ! yes, but he will grow 
up ; — then — but it is horrible ; — then are you for '* playing the 
honest man " ? What are the three things that militate 
against empire ? *' Pity and fine language and generosity to 
the fallen." ^ So the vote is carried, and Talthybius is sent 
(all against his own will) to fetch the baby and to explain to his 
mother that he is to be flung from the wall and killed. We 
watch her as she listens, as she speaks to her baby for the last 
time, and we hear her as she gives him up. Those who can 
may read the scene aloud. 

Things like this we know must be 
In every famous victory. 

*' Teach your other allies by a striking example." * 

An English critic, when the Troades was given in London 
in April 1905, wrote : ** It is nothing to us that a strong 
party in Athens deplored the sacking of Melos. We cannot 
sympathize with the political agitations of ancient Athens. 
We have no right to apply the lessons of Euripides to our 
own circumstances." Have we not ? Then let us apply 
them to Athenian circumstances. 

1 Cleon, Thuc. iii. 38, 7. 2 Pericles, Thuc. ii. 63. 

' Cleon, Thuc. iii. 40. Cf. Chapter III. p. 74. 
* Cleon, Thuc. iii. 40. 



i6o FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Men were talking of "the State, the State '* — of her great- 
ness and her beauty — how every man must be her " lover '* 
— of her empire, and her imperial destinies. And here rises 
Euripides and suggests the question ; " Suppose, after all, 
the whole thing, your State and your Empire and all — is a 
lie ? A sheer lie, however many of you unite to tell it — a 
contradiction of the deepest things and the truest and the most 
permanent in the universe. A story of a day — told to win 
you glory and position and cheap food at the cost of others ; 
it means the negation of the truth of husband and wife, the 
truth of mother and child — the truths of life, the truths told 
in the tears and love and pain that go with every human 
relation. A lie written black across every instinct of humanity. 
Look well to it ; you lie ! " 

Like Tolstoy, and in a minor degree Thoreau, Euripides 
gives the eternal challenge to all our conventions of state and 
policy and national existence. God — or, if you like. Nature — 
the ultimate author of it all — made fathers and mothers and 
little children, and homes and toys, and work and happiness ; 
and you invent great words, and for their sakes burn the 
home, and kill the father, sell the mother for a slave and a 
concubine, and dash the children against the stones. " Oh ! 
daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed " 

He asserts humanity against statesmen and economists 
and civil servants and all who hold that God made some 
people who do not really matter, whoever made them. He 
turns to woman and slave — the classes men despised and 
made tools of — and he drew them so that those who would 
see should see that they are human. Slavery, polygamy, 
concubinage, war — all the great accepted conventions, and the 
wonderful reasons that clever and rhetorical people can always 
find for what is wrong — reasons the more wonderful and con- 
vincing for the wrong, the more obviously wrong it is — 
he showed them for what they are, things that war against 
the soul. He goes back to Nature against all the conventions, 
but not as a sophist ; to the Real facts, to Humanity. No 
wonder the Athenians gave the prize that year to *' Xenocles, 
whoever he may have been." 

Lastly, in an age of talk and rhetoric and sophistry, when 
there was a reason for everything and as good a reason against 



EURIPIDES i6i 

everything, Euripides took refuge in the things for which 
no reasons are given. Men may argue about right and wrong, 
if they matter — in any case about sea-power; Euripides 
turned to the sea itself. Nobody argued about it, or about 
the green earth, the birds or the trees — he was safe there ; 
he could have them to himself ; they did not matter. He 
took refuge in Poetry — no opiate to dull the sense of life, but 
life itself, grasped and realized to the utmost, known and felt. 
In his lyrics, over and over again, we escape with him and 
find ourselves set free from policies and arguments and theories 
of the state, among the primeval and eternal truths : 

In the elm-woods and the oaken, 
There where Orpheus harped of old, 

And the trees awoke and knew him, 
And the wild things gathered to him, 

As he sang amid the broken 
Glens his music manifold ; 
Blessed Land of Pierie ! ^ 

There are birds — the Comic poets have much to say of little 
birds and their uses ; but Euripides does not think of their 
uses — he considers the birds — the little ones that nest in the 
cliffs above his cave,^ the greater birds that migrate, that 
come with the spring from the South and go again when 
winter follows. 

On wings through air would we fly, 
As the Libyan birds in line, 
Leaving the rain and the wintry sky, 

Follow the sign, 
Their chief's shrill note ; and the wild-bird train 
For the land of harvest that knows not rain. 
Flies, and we hear the cry. 
O long-necked birds in the night, 
Where the clouds scud on as ye go. 
Where the Pleiads reach their zenith height 
And Orion's fires glow — 
Tidings we bid you bring 

To Eurotas — words of joy. 
News, news of their king — 
He cometh, he cometh, their king, 
Conqueror home from Troy.^ 

1 Bacchae, 560-565 (Murray's translation). 
\Ci. Hippolytus, 732 f. ^ Helena, 1479-1493 

n 



i62 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Such things he studies ; he has them to himself, " and 
impulses of deeper birth have come to him in solitude." The 
simple natural things — birds and trees, women and children, 
when men will let them alone — the happy, natural relations 
— there is peace in these things. But still there is the world 
of men, and his lyrics lead us back to it. Can we take our 
new-found peace back with us ? 

In Salamis, filled with the foaming 

Of billows and murmur of bees, 
Old Telamon stayed from his roaming, 
Long ago, on a throne of the seas ; 
Looking out on the hills olive-laden, 

Enchanted where first from the earth 
The grey-gleaming fruit of the Maiden 

Athena had birth ; 
A soft grey crown for a city- 
Beloved, a City of Light : 
Yet he rested not there, nor had pity, 

But went forth in his might. 
Where Heracles wandered, the lonely 

Bow-bearer, and lent him his hands 
For the wrecking of one land only, 
Of Ilion, Ilion only. 

Most hated of lands ! ^ 

Once more joy and pain — the twin roots of Poetry — the 
twofold training of man — two sides to the one avenue to Truth. 
Euripides has not told us all there is to know nor solved all 
the problems ; but he has felt them, and he knov/s the path 
to knowledge. There are other poets — poets of Greece and 
of our own lands — but not many who have read so clearly 
our trouble or grasped so well the value of Joy and Pain. 
^ Troades, 794-806 (Murray's translation). 



CHAPTER VI 
THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 

ONE day, we are told — it would be somewhere about the 
middle of the Peloponnesian War — Socrates met in a 
narrow lane a lad of the upper classes, a lad of spirit 
and pleasant appearance. He put up his staff, and, blocking 
the way so, he asked the lad where one commodity and another 
was to be had. The boy told him, and then came a harder 
question : Where do men become kaloi kdgathoi ? When the 
boy said he did not know, " Then come with me and learn,'* 
said the old man. " And after that," concludes the story, 
" he was a pupil of Socrates." ^ 

The question is in a way the sign of a new age. The 
phrase employed was on the whole a new one, for though 
Thucydides has it twice, he brings out that it is a colloquialism. ^ 
But the colloquialism had a future, cant term as it was. Liter- 
ally it meant " beautiful and good " ; ^ but the Greeks, like 
other people, used moral terms in a social and political sense, 
and it came to mean something very like ** gentleman," though 
perhaps with the implication of a little more culture than our 
word carries. What was the education of a gentleman ? 
Where and how were gentlemen made ? 

A change had come over Athens — slowly, but at last per- 
ceptibly. The intellectual upheaval of the age of Pericles was 
not to be undone. Still *' that native Attic trick is blooming, 
that ' What do you really mean ? * " * There is still the scrutiny 
of inherited belief with all its unsettling effects. " Do you 

^ Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 2, §48, aldrjficov koI cveidio-Taros els vTrep^dKrjv. 
2 Thuc. iv. 40, 2 ; viii. 48, 6. Also Herodotus, ii. 143 ; see Chapter I. 
p. 25. 

8 See below, p. 172. 

* Aristophanes, Clouds, II73, rovro Tov7rtxa>ptop aTe^vas iiravOeif ro 'ri 

Xeycts <TV, 

163 



i64 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

not remark, I said, how great is the evil that dialectic has 
introduced ? What evil ? he said. The students of the art 
are filled with lawlessness. . . . When the questioning spirit 
asks what is fair or honourable, and the man answers as the 
legislator has taught him, and then arguments many and 
diverse refute his words, until he is driven into believing that 
nothing is honourable any more than dishonourable, or just 
and good any more than the reverse, and so of all the notions 
which he most valued, do you think that he will still honour 
and obey them as before 1 " ^ There is a danger, Plato says — 
and he had been proved right — in young men getting too early 
the taste for dialectic. Some one asks in a play of Euripides : 

2l thought best rendered perhaps in Hamlet *s sentence : 
" There's nothing good or bad but our thinking makes it so." 
It raises — and half suggests an answer to — the great question 
of the relations between convention, law, tradition — all those 
inherited forms of belief and practice grouped under the 
conception of Nomos — and the greater conception of Nature. 
Once such a question has been raised, it must be settled — not 
with a half-answer but decisively. Meanwhile every man, it 
seemed, could think as he pleased and decide for himself, for 
there was no other standard than himself — ^he was the measure 
of all things.2 Right and wrong were just what you made 
them, just what you wanted — so the Melians found, so Callicles 
insisted — there was nothing else in practice or theory. But 
was there not ? 

It might be convenient for the democracy to use this 
theory in international relations, but it was another thing at 
home. It bred a new type of man, and not a type that a 
democracy needs. Tyrants Greek states had known of old — 
men who frankly aimed at self-aggrandizement and achieved 
it ; but there|had never been any moral sanction for their 
act. The new type seemed to have a sanction — the sanction 
of intellect. So the new education came to this — that the 
trained intellect was discharged of all duty to the State ; it 
was anti-democratic beyond anything the world had yet seen ; 

1 Plato, Rep. 537E, 5380, 539B (Jowett's translation). 

2 The view of Protagoras set forth in Plato, Theaet. 152A. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 165 

it abolished society. And yet there was no way of going back. 
Thought had been set in motion, and till it was satisfied with 
reason it could not be stilled. When the issue is to know or 
not to know, youth at least will insist on knowing, at whatever 
cost ; and in that resolve lies the hope of the future. 

In the meantime, there were signs of reaction. The quick 
turns of self-applauding intellects did not exhaust all there 
was to be known — perhaps they were too quick. The trick of 
the conjurer does not alter the laws of nature, the conditions 
under which we live ; however brilliant he is at sleight of hand, 
he does not alter anything that is fundamental, whether he 
makes our shillings vanish or our sense of right and wrong. 
The period with which we have now to deal shows at once the 
full effects of the sophistic movement at its zenith, and then it 
is past its zenith. The new generation shows the outcome of 
the new enlightenment and of that deeper questioning, which 
sought either by quiet sense or reasoned endeavour to find 
a permanent foundation for life. Euripides represents the age, 
but he was already an old man, and while Athens never let 
go what he had given her, the generation that grew up in his 
last twenty years strikes a different note in literature. He 
taught them to feel ; and in the feelings which he taught them 
to recognize they began to surmise there was solution for the 
questions he asked — they move to the view that human life 
matters somehow, that force and individual cleverness are 
not all, that elusive as it is there is reason in all human 
relations. 

In this period ideas are struck out in education which long 
held sway in the ancient world, and which hold sway still. 
There is a beginning made, hesitantly it is true, of scientific 
research or at least inquiry. Culture becomes a deliberate 
ideal. Philosophy reaches a new plane altogether. And in 
the meantime everybody was free to educate his son as he 
pleased.^ 

Mathematics and Astronomy were beginning to claim atten- 
tion, but there was disagreement as to their value. Aris- 
tophanes made great game of them — Socrates hoisted high to 

1 Plato, Alcib. i. 122B, ovdevl /xe'Xet. Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, x. 9, 13, 
p. 1 1 80a ; in most cities no system, but every man, like the Cyclops, 
is lawgiver for his children and his wife. 



i66 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

tread the air and look down on the sun/ mingling his subtle 
thought with the kindred air, and Meton coming with rods 
to land-survey the air for the birds, and mete it out by acres/ 
are figures of comedy, even if they have an element of history. 
For, though it has been recently suggested that perhaps at 
the time of the production of the Clouds Socrates had an interest 
in Physics which he afterwards lost, it is generally agreed on 
the evidence of Plato and Xenophon that he did not care for 
Astronomy and kindred studies. When he was young, 
Socrates says in the Phaedo,^ he had a great passion for such 
subjects, and he read the books of Anaxagoras with enthusiasm, 
till he found that the writer made no use of Mind at all, and 
that his causes after all were air and aether and water — that 
jhe confused cause with means. Xenophon, always anxious 
I to prove his teacher practical, says that Socrates emphasized 
I the value of Astronomy so far as it bore on navigation, but 
that he deprecated worry about the distances and periods of 
the stars.* Plutarch shows us, in the story of Nicias* failure 
in Sicily, how disastrous the popular suspicion of scientific 
Astronomy could be ; for it was Anaxagoras, he says, who 
first, with more clearness and courage than any other man, 
wrote an explanation of lunar eclipses, but it was a secret book 
only circulated among friends, and Nicias was at the mercy of 
an ignorant soothsayer. ^ Geometry Socrates tolerated to the 
extent to which it could be used in land-surveying. 

Grammar and Rhetoric were subjects against which there 
could be no theological suspicion, and while the former could 
be criticized as dealing in words not things, and the latter as 
tending to dishonesty, both gained a permanent place in Greek 
education, which in course of time became a predominant 
place. Their great champion in the fourth century was Isocrates, 
who was at this very time receiving that careful education, 
which (he tells us) his father gave him, and winning more 
distinction among his fellow-students than he had, if we could 
believe him, later on among his fellow-citizens.® He thought 
indeed that Geometry and Astronomy had their value up to 
a certain point — hke Dialectic — ^for they kept the young out 
of mischief and were in measure a useful sort of training, but 

^ Clouds, 225. 2 Birds, 995. ^ Phaedo, 96A £f. 

* Mem. iv. 7, 4-6. ^ Plut. Nicias, 23, 2-4. * Isocrates, Antid. i6i. 



i 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 167 

not a real preparation for life.^ Real culture he defined as a 
union of savoir-faire, gaiety, and moderation, with mastery of 
pleasure and misfortune, and the ability to carry success ^ — 
a definition much like Horace's. 

Far more significant, however, was the education which 
the young Athenian got without noticing it. Long ago 
Simonides had written, ttoKl^ avhpa SiSdaKet — the city 
teacheth a man — a sentence of more meanings than one.^ 
Athens was an education for Greece, Pericles said.* Plato 
later on insisted that it is the Many themselves that are the 
real sophists — the so-called sophists only give back to the 
Many their own original opinions.^ The ephebeia of later days, 
a system of state training and drilling for youths from eighteen 
to twenty, did not yet exist, it would seem ; ^ so they could 
begin to join in national life at once as men. Indeed they 
began still earlier, and were taken by their fathers to the law- 
courts and the. theatres.' Aristophanes produced his first 
play — or got another to produce it for him—when he was 
about twenty-three ; and some years before he was thirty, he 
wrote his brilliant comedy on modern education, the Clouds, 
in which, ** quite unconscious of the debt he owes to the 
conditions he derides, he sets his face stubbornly toward the 
past." ^ Twenty years later he flouts the stripling boys — 

Tragedians by the myriad, who can chatter 
A furlong faster than Euripides — 

whole choirs of swallows, who as a rule are only capable of 
one tragedy each ^ — though he is not as grateful for this as 
he might be. The Athenian drama, with its inspiration and 
its wonder, was no small factor in education* Politics, we 
know, were talked incessantly and everywhere in Athens, 
and elections were annual, and impeachment scarcely less 
often. The small houses and the warm dry climate made life 

^ Isocrates, Panath. 26-28 — ** up to a certain point " ; so CaUicles 
too held about Philosophy {Gorg. 484c) ; so the natural Englishman 
about most things, according to Walter Bagehot. 

2 Isocrates, Panath. 30, 31. 

3 Simonides, Frag. 67 (109), in Plut. an seni resp. c. i. 

* Thuc. ii. 41, I. 5 Plato, Rep. 492 a. 

« See A. A. Bryant's delightful study of Boyhood in Athens in 
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, xviii. pp. 79-88. 

' Ibid. p. 98. 8 /^^-^^ p^ p2. 9 Aristophanes, Frogs, 89. 



i68 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

in the open air the inevitable thing — for men at least. So that 
without going outside the streets of a not very large town, and 
with the aid of occasional days at the Peiraieus, an Athenian 
boy picked up unconsciously a good deal of political and 
literary culture. What he learnt at the play was reinforced 
by music lessons ^ and a good deal more dancing than we 
might have expected. All these things go, as Socrates ironic- 
ally says, to show how much the moderns excel the ancients 
in wisdom. 2 

Side by side with intellectual training something must be 
said of athletics. In the fifth century they had at once risen 
and declined in importance. Mr. Kenneth Freeman remarked 
that the preference given to conversation over exercise was a 
feature of the age.^ The reason was that athletics had become 
too specialized and therefore too important for amateurs. 
When Socrates, in Xenophon's Symposium, proposes to take 
dancing lessons, it is not, like long-distance runners, to have 
stout legs and thin shoulders, or like boxers, to have stout 
shoulders and thin legs, but to be evenly developed.* The 
athlete was trained for his particular event with the passion 
and the consecration of a religion. To " eat like a wrestler " 
was a proverb. 5 The habit of body of Greek athletes was, 
according to Plato, rather a sleepy sort of thing and danger- 
ous to health ; they slept away their lives and were liable to 
serious illnesses from slight departures from their regimen.® 
In particular Plato derides a certain Herodicus of Selymbria, 

1 Generally the lyre. Alcibiades refused altogether to learn to 
play the flute (Plut. Alcih. 2). 

2 Plato, Hippias Major, p. 28 3 a. 

' Schools of Hellas. A digression may be forgiven in a note. I 
am struck with the fact, which older men emphasize, of how very 
modern is the present-day systematization of athletics in the Uni- 
versities. Forty years ago, or fifty, men walked in the afternoons — 
walked a great deal, saw the country round Cambridge — and talked as 
they went, and their talk was discussion. I am also told by those, who 
remember those days, what education there was in it ; and I can 
believe them. At any rate they had Socrates on their side, and in fact 
all Greek thinkers of note down to Porphyry. Porphyry grouped 
athletes with the stupid classes, including, alas ! soldiers and business 
men. 

* Symp. 2, 17. 5 Aristophanes, Peace, i^,, aairep 'TraXmarrjs. 

^ Plato, Rep. iii. 404A. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 169 

who had a " system " of his own for training — he mixed 
medicine and gymnastic, and tortured first himself and then 
the rest of the world by the invention of lingering death.^ 
Ordinary people could not contend with professionals, and let 
athletics alone, except as spectators. 

The fact was, there was a considerable shifting of interest. 
Xenophanes long ago had said that athletics were overdone — 
a view which drew on him the censure of Sir Richard J ebb, 
who as a good conservative Member of ParHament compared 
him with modern faddists. This even faddists might forgive 
to an enthusiast for Pindar ; but the sober mind of Greece 
moved to the opinion of Xenophanes ; and life and politics 
and literature and philosophy grew so absorbing that athletes 
and athletics yielded place to nobler interests. Pericles 
made the Athenians talkers, said Socrates to tease Callicles.^ 
That was inevitable. A man who manages a big departmental 
store has to do more talking than his father did who was a 
small farmer. Commerce and the control of a great empire 
involve speech and plenty of it ; and the Athenians enjoyed 
it. The gloomy Athenian Oligarch, writing in 424, says the 
Demos has done away with those who practise gymnastic or 
music here.3 None the less the great athletes were popular 
heroes — to see if not to imitate ; and significance attached to 
the great Games, as the fame of the Spartan Lichas and the 
extraordinary outfit of chariots by Alcibiades prove. 

It may be, as some hold, that the reaction against athletics 
went too far — at least, athletics considered as training. In 
his Clouds Aristophanes, aged seven-and-twenty, like a healthy 
undergraduate emphasizes the importance of the old training 
and the general weedy, sappy, dirty look of Socrates' hangers- 
on in the Thinking-Shop — like the Laconian prisoners from 
Pylos ; — they were not allowed to be in the open air very much, 
it is explained.* The Just Argument, appearing in person 
on the stage, tells of the old days when modesty was in fashion, 
when boys held their tongues and went to school, — and learnt 

1 Rep. iii. 406A. 

2 Plato, Gorg, 515E. The irony of this is splendid; some people 
fancied it was Socrates who had taught people to chatter ; there was 
a play of Aristophanes about it. 

2 Oligarch's Ath. Rep. 1,13. * Aristophanes, Clouds, 186, 198. 



170 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the real old music there, not the " turn, trill, tweedle-trash ** 
of to-day, — when they knew good manners and practised them 
at home, and went to the gymnasia and grew ruddy of cheek 
and sound of limb, broad-shouldered, strong, silent men — 
instead of the narrow-chested, thief-faced, swindling jargoners 
bred nowadays by Socrates and his like. This, of course, was 
one of the crimes of Socrates for the poet. 

The friends of Socrates told another tale, for Xenophon sets 
forth a conversation he had with a youth in bad condition, 
who excused himself on the ground that he was just an ihiwrrj^i, 
not a professional, and the sage warned him at once of the 
risks for himself and the State in case of war, and, in any case, 
of the mental and moral consequences of a neglected body — 
" even where the use of the body might seem slightest — in 
thinking, who does not know that many come to great grief 
for want of bodily health ? " ^ The old man himself, like Dr. 
Johnson in this as in much else, was a model of sound con- 
dition and muscular strength and endurance. Bodily training 
was one thing, athletic eminence another. The athlete was 
useless as a soldier — ^he was not adaptable, either for the 
variety of duty or of diet that a military campaign made 
necessary. Some generations later the State undertook the 
task of giving and enforcing the training thought desirable, 
but in the days of Pericles and in the war-time that followed 
his death men were left to bring up their sons as they pleased, 
or as their sons pleased. 

It is of interest perhaps to note in passing how with scarcely 
a break in its history the general scheme of Athenian education 
has come down to our own day. The half -rhetorical, half- 
literary training which Isocrates gave, and which he valued 
so highly, became the standard of Greek culture. Centuries 
after Christ we find Greeks all over their half of the Roman 
Empire with hardly another ideal. The Romans themselves 
adopted it ; it lived through the Middle Ages and received 
new life at the Renaissance ; and it was only in the last fifty 
years that Science — not precisely the sciences so much debated 
by Socrates and his contemporaries — gained a real foothold 
in general education. Isocrates was essentially a shallow and 

1 Mem. iii. 12, 1-8. See the whole chapter. Even if the voice is 
the voice of Xenophon, it is significant as evidence. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 171 

thin nature, and it is easy to understand the modem reaction 
against his conceptions of culture ; but we may yet have to 
own that Socrates' preference of men over stars and triangles 
may cut deeper than we have thought, and to admit sorrow- 
fully that we have given Natural Science too large a place in 
our scheme of education — that it does not educate the young 
quite so much as we thought it would with its emphasis on 
observation and its close reasoning, perhaps because after all 
the proper study of mankind is man. " Forgive me, my dear 
sir," said Socrates, " but I am so fond of learning. And fields, 
you know, and trees refuse to teach me anything, but men in 
the city will."^ It is a shocking sentiment, which loyalty to 
Wordsworth bids us reject at once, and we do reject it ; — and 
yet, one-sided as it is, it is true too. 

We left Socrates with the lad in the lane, face to face with 
the difficult question of how, or where, a gentleman could be 
trained ; and we must return to them. The story, of course, 
may be a mere legend or even a pure invention, like Washington 
and the hatchet ; but it is perhaps just as likely to be true as 
false. The boy was Xenophon, the son of Gryllos ; and, whether 
or not his acquaintance with Socrates began in this charming 
way, he was a friend of Socrates ; the ideal of the kalos kdgathos 
was what Gryllos clearly set before his son, and Xenophon 
himself, a generation later, set it before his twin boys in the 
country home at Scillus. There are one or two other anecdotes 
of Xenophon's youth, of less historical value. We are told that 
Socrates saved his life at the battle of Delium,^ but this involves 
so many chronological difficulties, and there is so easy an ex- 
planation in a confusion of tradition, that the tale is rejected. 
The battle was in 424. The dates of Xenophon's life point to 
431, or some year very near it, as the year of his birth. It is 
also said — and M. Croiset believes it is likely to be true— that 
Xenophon was for a while a prisoner of war in Thebes.^ He 
certainly describes Proxenos the Theban as a friend of old days, 
when he joined him in Cyrus' army ; and he as certainly dis- 
liked Thebes and Thebans, and the absence of Epameinondas 
from his pages is very conspicuous. Philip of Macedon, it is 

1 Plato, Phaed. 230D. 

2 Strabo, c. 403. Diogenes Laertius, ii. 5, 7, § 22. 

3 Philostratus is the authority ; Croiset, Xenophon, p. 16. 



172 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

said, owed some of his hatred of Thebes to his residence there 
as a hostage. But there were many reasons why Xenophon 
and other people should dislike Thebes quite apart from any 
captivity there.^ If he was at Thebes, it is suggested that 
he may have met there Prodicos of Ceos, whom he has im- 
mortalized by making Socrates quote his Choice of Herakles.^ 

But after all Athens was the home of Xenophon's boyhood, 
and there he grew up. It might be said that he is not altogether 
a typical Athenian — ^he is quieter a great deal than the Athenian 
we are taught to see in Comedy or in the speeches of the orators, 
and he is not the ideal citizen sketched by Pericles in the Funeral 
Speech — not so amazingly alert and electric. He belongs to 
another social group — quiet, thoughtful, sound, and conservative ; 
and in the end, like other greater men, he has seen so much of 
the world, Hellenic and non- Hellenic, that Athens is no longer 
all the world to him, and conservative as he is, he is already 
reaching out to a new Greek world altogether. But he begins 
as an Athenian kalos kdgathos. 

" Beautiful and good " — each of the words had a variety 
of suggestion — physical ^ and moral beauty, the sense of honour, 
good birth, good connexions, sound thinking, sound character 
— and the combined phrase came to have a political mean- 
ing, like gentleman and noble in English. The allies, says 
Phrynichos, in Thucydides' Eighth Book, will want to be free 
from Athens altogether — they will not care about " the so-called 
kaloi kdgathoi ; they will say they are the persons who sug- 
gested crimes to the popular mind, who provided the means 
for their execution, and who reaped the fruits themselves." * 
Jowett translates the phrase " the so-called nobility," Crawley 
" the so-called better classes." Yet when Xenophon describes 
Ischomachus in one of his later books, he makes Socrates say 
that Ischomachus was one of those who are justly entitled to 
'* that great name (to aefivov ovofia) kalos kdgathos " ^ — 

The grand old name of gentleman — 

1 Cf. Hellenica, ii. 2, 19. 2 Mem. ii. i, 21-34. 

^ Socrates, in the Oecon. 6, 16, says physical beauty is not all that 
is involved ; people of physical beauty he often found to be knaves 
in their soul. 

* Thuc. viii. 48, 6. ^ Xen. Oecon. ch. 6, 12, 14 ; and ch. 7. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 173 

and the picture he draws is that of a man indeed worthy of the 
name, even if he does lean a little to the heavier implication of 
the term (T€/iiv6<;} Xenophon came of this class — that is clear i 
on every page he writes ; and long before Socrates asked him ' 
the question, the matter of the education proper for a kalos 
kdgathos had been in the mind of his father. 

The whole family atmosphere was clearly conservative — 
ideas, traditions, friendships, associations. ** The city teaches 
the man " — but at home, it would seem, there was another^ 
influence. We have only to think of Thucydides and Euripides' 
in connexion with Xenophon to feel how far away he stands 
from their outlook on life. Of course he has not at all so strong 
and original an intellect as either of them, but quite apart from 
that he approaches life from another angle. For instance, 
compare the attitude of Thucydides to religion — the contrast 
that Euripides suggests would be too violent. Thucydides 
lays stress, as we have seen, on a powerful natural endowment, 
natural force ((pvo-eco^ to*%^9) ; ^ Xenophon, of course, knows the 
forceful character when he meets him, but in all his books he 
makes it clear that a man's position is stronger and his head 
clearer, if he will use such means as he can to supplement him- 
self with the knowledge of what the gods' will is and to secure 
their support and inspiration.^ He sacrifices perpetually, he 
consults the oracle, he has a mantis at his side, he watches for 
omens — all this, though the most practical and business-like 
of men. He will '* keep his powder dry " — that runs through 
the Anabasis — ^but he thinks it worth while to " trust God." 
Thucydides would have given both " God " and '* trust " a very 
different meaning, if he had been asked to use the expression. 
The detachment of Thucydides in recording men's use of oracle, 
temple, festival, and the like, and their violation of such things, 
is notorious. Xenophon was frankly shocked, and owns it, 
at the butchery in Corinth — on a feast day — at altars — before 
the images of the gods — the men who did it were " most im- 

1 See the dialogue of Hippolytus with the huntsman (who brings 
out this sense of o-efivos) in Euripides' Hippolytus. 

2 See Bruns, Lit. Portrdt, p. 412, on this controversy as to force of 
natural endowment, and the remark of Socrates on the question of 
Themistocles' natural gifts, Mem. iv. 2, 2. 

8 On this whole matter (see Mem. i. 4), a chapter, where, if Socrates 
is the speaker, he carries his pupil with him. 



174 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

pious," "utterly without law in their thoughts," it was "pro- 
fanation." ^ Grote remarks that the Argives would be com- 
paratively unimpressed by solemnities peculiar to Corinth ; 
Xenophon feels that they should have been impressed. Eduard 
Meyer says downright that the restoration (in 404) aimed at 
calling fear of God and pious custom back to life, but that 
instead of the old naive piety there came a formalist religiosity, 
which Xenophon shows us, Xenophon the typical representa- 
tive of the reaction in literature.^ The criticism seems coloured 
by some suggestion of memories of the reaction in Europe after 
the French Revolution — the artificial and unholy piety of the 
pupils of the Jesuits and the Holy Alliance. A good deal 
depends on outlook. Dr. Johnson's acts of devotion seemed 
absurd to Horace Walpole and superstitious to William Cowper ; 
yet they were honest conviction and lifelong. It is surely 
fairer criticism to suggest that Xenophon represents not a 
reaction but an outlook and an attitude that had never passed 
away. None the less, it all strikes a reader oddly who comes 
upon it after studying Herodotus and Thucydides, and recalls 
that Herodotus was dead before Xenophon was born. After all, 
the conservative mind is a problem we still have with us. 
Xenophon is a natural conservative, by instinct and training, 
but a true one with no archaizing fancies, no make-believe, and 
no self-conscious cult of reaction. So much is obvious, and 
it surely makes it certain that he is not acting a part in his 
religion, either to impress us or to amuse or cheat himself. 

He believes in the gods, in Providence, in divine care for 
men ; and he quotes — or represents — Socrates as maintaining 
that the unwritten laws ever5Avhere observed are not of 
man's contrivance but of the gods' making.^ That is clearly 
Xenophon's own view, by the time he had seen a good deal 
of human Hf e in and out of the Greek world ; and it would 
fseem to go back, too, to his early days. The great political 
ideal of kaloi kdgathoi for the nation was what they called 
sophrosyne — sometimes a mere euphemism for oligarchy, but 
more properly a spirit of self-control, almost the English 
instinct of " not going too far." Plato fervently preached it 
for states and individuals in his Republic. It was the ideal 

1 Hellenica, iv. 4, 3. ^ E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 882, 

3 Mem. iv. 4, 19. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 175 

that a decent man held up before his boy ; it was the key-note 
of Xenophon's conduct throughout Hfe — it is " dyed in the 
wool." Sound morals and sound, if perhaps slow, thinking i 
are the marks of the man and of his class. He draws himself I ' 
in Ischomachus, to whom we shall have to return, and suggests 
his own training as well as his ideals in the picture. Thucydides 
might have classed him with Nicias ''for a life ordered by a 
conventional virtue " — with the suggestion of malice that 
Professor Bury finds in the phrase, if that be the translation 
— or more simply and naturally " for his exact attention to 
every duty " ; ^ and, malice or none, Xenophon might have 
accepted the description and the classing. 

In later life it is clear he had great love of the country. 
Possibly from the Peace of Nicias (421), or even earlier, till'/ 
the occupation of Deceleia (413) he lived in the country house, ■ 
or on the farm, of his family.^ In the books that he writes 
about Socrates it has been remarked that like Plato he creates 
Socrates something after his own image — with an interest 
in things Persian and military and agricultural that went 
beyond that felt perhaps by the actual Socrates. Town- 
bred men do take to country life, but the satisfaction which 
Xenophon appears to have found in it goes, I think, beyond 
the city-dweller's of his age. He is as keen about it as any 
countryman on Aristophanes' stage, and a good deal less 
urban in his ideas of life than some of them. 

If his youth was spent largely in the country, it might 
help to account for his slight interest in two of the chief pre- 
occupations of Athens, politics and the drama. He is far 
removed from the Periclean democrat ; when his own tastes 
appear, he shows an interest in Monarchy, a preference for 
it, that is almost a prophecy of the later Greece. Cyrus and 
Agesilaos are his heroes — no Athenian statesman, scarcely 
even Thrasybulus. Democracy, as he knew it in Elis or 
Corinth, he did not care for, and he was little in Athens after 

1 Thuc. vii. 86, 5. 

2 Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, i, §48, at all events, says Xenophon, 
belonged to the deme Erchia ; and that was a country deme, on the 
eastward side of PenteHcos, perhaps seventeen or eighteen miles from 
Athens (Dakyns' translation, vol. i. p. Ixxiii). Isocrates belonged to 
the same deme (Jebb, Attic Orators, ii. p. 432). 



176 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

404. He is, of course, more soldier than politician, and the 
ideal household which he sketches under the name of 
Ischomachus has an order and an efficiency almost military 
— the husband is commander-in-chief, the wife is trained to 
be an able second in com_mand, and everything has to be as 
orderly as it was on the Phoenician ship, down to the boots, 
as we shall see. Democracy was another story — slapdash 
improvisation at best, muddling through, and declining very 
swiftly in chaos, panic, and injustice. It may be that he was 
not among the boys who were bred in politics. Nor does it 
appear that he took much interest in drama. One of the 
speakers in the Memorabilia mentions Sophocles as a man 
he admires for his tragedy,^ but there is little trace in 
Xenophon's books of any great influence exerted upon himself 
by tragedy or even of interest in it. Mr. Dakyns speaks of 
the dramatizing and development of his characters, Shake- 
speare-wise,^ but on the whole it is more the outcome of his 
native instinct for story-telling. Socrates chaffs Critobulus 
in the Oeconomicus for his readiness to rise at cock-crow and 
trudge off to see a comedy,^ and Xenophon has more than 
one reference to the attack made on Socrates in the Clouds ; * 
and there, I think, it ends. Dialogue could be learnt in 
another school — the pupil of Socrates need not go to the 
stage for that. 

There is in Xenophon's Symposium a pleasing character 
called Niceratos. When the question goes round, " On what 
do you most pride yourself ? " and it comes to his turn, he 
has an answer ready that amazes us. " My father," he says, 
" in his pains to make me a good man, compelled me to learn 
the whole of Homer's poems, and so it comes about that even 
now I can repeat the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart." " But 
you haven't forgotten," interjects Antisthenes the Cynic, 
" that all the rhapsodes know these poems too ? " *' How 
could I have, when I listen to them nearly every day ? " 

^ Mem. i. 4, 3. 

2 Notes to translation of Cyrop. (Everyman edition), p. 78. He 
also finds in the death of Pantheia *' Euripidean " touches throughout 
{ibid. p. 249). 

3 Oecon. 3, 5. 

^ Oecon. II, 3 ; and Symp. 6, 6, where the Syracusan meaning to 
be rude raises the question of the flea's jump. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 177 

" Then do you know any sillier breed than the rhapsodes ? " 
" No, by Zeus," said Niceratos, *' I don't think I do." ^ 

It is interesting to find the rhapsodes still a flourishing 
profession in a day when Euripides is expelling Homer from 
his traditional post of teacher of all Greece — " much," says 
Eduard Meyer, *' as among Germans Goethe has replaced 
the Bible." ^ Still more interesting is it to come on a man 
like the father of Niceratos in such an age. " He called 
Simonides a bad poet and ran down Aeschylus," says a man 
in the Clouds ^ — so modern can people be ; and here is an 
Athenian citizen who makes his son learn all Homer by heart, 
word for word — whose scheme of culture is Homer. There 
are many worse systems of education, duller and less educative. 
One guesses that in the house of Gryllos Homer kept his old 
place,* and that the young Xenophon, if he could not repeat 
the whole of the poems word for word, had his Homer by 
heart in another way. Grote, at any rate, found the Homeric 
note in the Anabasis — " in the true Homeric vein and in 
something like Homeric language." ^ Dakyns remarks on 
his old Attic words and inflexions. He had Homer at his 
finger-ends, like Plato, and unlike Plato he had no quarrel 
with the poet. Others of the old poets he quotes — Hesiod, 
Theognis, and Epicharmus ; and he makes Simonides of Ceos 
a speaker in his dialogue the Hiero. It all points to a sound, 
quiet education in old-time literature, and the reader may 
recall what Charles Lamb has to say of the benefits he and 
his sister drew from the accident that put them in the way 
of seventeenth-century and not eighteenth-century literature. 

The outdoor life of the young Xenophon is written in his 
books, but he had other scenes than the streets. Twice over 
he gives us an account of hare-hunting — once from the lips of 
Socrates, whom we should not have guessed to be so expert, 
and once with even more spirit and vividness from the didactic 

1 Symp. iii. 5, 6. Cf. Mem. iv. 2, 10 ; and the inimitable description 
of the rhapsode in Plato's Ion, with his graces and poses and artistic 
temperament. 

2 E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 902. ^ Clouds, 136 1-8. 

* In Mem. iv. 2, 10, Euthy demos has a complete copy of Homer. 
It is pleasant to read of Alcibiades hitting a teacher who had no Homer ; 
he was not always so judicious (Plut. Alcih. 2). 

^ Grote, History, viii. 379. 
12 



178 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Cambyses, the father of Cyrus — and Cambyses, it would 
appear, knew all about bird-snaring too, and how to do it on 
a winter's night. ^ The joy of the boy Cyrus at the sight of 
the horse which his grandfather has provided for his first 
riding lessons may be a reminiscence of Xenophon's own 
boyhood 2 — "he was more than delighted at learning to 
ride" [iTnTeveiv fiavOdvcov v'Trepe-)(aLpev). In horses Xenophon 
remained interested to the end. As to formal athletics, he 
seems to have cared very little for them. He lived for years 
a very few miles from Olympia, and he hardly mentions the 
place— certainly without any trace of that interest which 
always appears when he feels it. 

It was a boyhood ideal in many ways — Homer and the 
open country-side, the soundest of training in great literature, 
and the constant stimulus to observation, the constant variety, 
of a boy's life on farm and mountain-side — a wise and quiet 
father (though he has indeed no occasion to speak of him, and 
so much is deduction) — and an early training in religion and 
Sophrosyne. And then Athens and Socrates, and his first 
experiences of a soldier's life. 

To discuss Socrates at length and the inter-relations of the 
historic Socrates with the Platonic, the Xenophontine and the 
x\ristotelian Socrates, would take us too far from the matter 
in hand. That his own pupils would know him better than a 
man in the following generation, most people would be willing 
to admit. But the more closely their works are studied, the 
plainer it becomes that neither Plato nor Xenophon has felt 
it necessary to confine himself to literal history. In Plato's 
later works it is notorious that " Socrates " is less and less 
like the Athenian who taught Plato. Similarly, whatever 
his purpose when he began to write, it is clear that Xenophon 
\ from time to time treats Socrates in much the same way, and 
j credits him with interests and conversations which the real 
Socrates never had. " If Cyrus had lived," says Socrates to 
Critobulus ; and the very words proclaim that here we have 
parted company with history. But this is in the Oeconomicus ; 
yet the conversation with the younger Pericles in the Third 

^■Mem, iii. II, 8 ; Cyvop. i. 6, 39-40- 

2 Cyrop. i. 3, 3. On the wild life of Attica see Mrs. R. C. Bosanquet, 
Days in Attica, p. 305. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 179 

Book of the Memorabilia — with Socrates as mihtary adviser, 
citing Mysian and Pisidian parallels — is a warning that we 
must not take what we read too literally. Dichtung und 
Wahrheit is the key-note here as in Plato. Xenophon, it is 
well said, is not a Greek Boswell.^ The Memorabilia have not f 
the solid historical structure of the Life of Johnson, nor, it \ 
must be added, its amazing skill and perennial charm. They 
are a contribution of' great value to our knowledge of Socrates, 
and yet rather in their general impression than in their detail. ■ 
Here it must suffice to deal with the general significance of 
the man as a quickening force, an influence for the deepening 
of life in his own generation and for many that followed. 

" He was always in the public eye," writes Xenophon, 
" for he used to go early in the morning to the public walks 
and the gymnasia ; and when the market was full, he was 
conspicuous there, and for the rest of the day he was always 
where he would meet most people. And he was generally 
talking." ^ He was easily recognized. Plato, using Alcibiades 
as a speaker — a name that would allow a certain freedom 
and vigour of speech, Kar ^AkKi^idhrjv, as a scholiast on 
Thucydides put it, and also because the friendship between 
Socrates and Alcibiades was only too notorious — describes how 
like Seilenos Socrates looked, but how he too was a god within.^ 
He was generally talking, and there were always people ready 
to listen, for the conversation was very apt to take unexpected 
turns. Men spoke of his irony — his playful way of pretending 
not to know, and of pursuing inquiries and suggesting diffi- 
culties and new points of view, till no one was quite sure 
where pretence left off and earnest began. " Chaerephon, is 
Socrates serious in all this, or only joking ? " "If you are 
serious and what you say is really true, the life of all of us 
must be fairly upside down." * And it was so amusing, too, 
for anybody not actually engaged in the argument ; ^ the 
most trifling admission might disconcert the opponent, and 
common sense itself might be a disastrous ally. " You have 
the oddest way, Socrates, of twisting arguments every now 
and then, and getting them topsy-turvy." ^ He could make 

1 J. T. Forbes, Socrates, p. 107. 2 Xen. Mem. i. i, 10. 

3 Plato, Symp. 21 5A. * Plato, Gorg. 481 b, c. 

^ Plato, Apol. 33c, '4(TTiyap ovK drj^is. • Gorg. SUA. 



i8o FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

a man look unexpectedly foolish ; and yet, while he turned 
him inside out, it was all done in good temper and with good 
breeding — maddeningly so — and he was never dogmatic ; he 
would suggest this or that, throw out an idea, and take your 
mind upon it ; but you must be very careful how you answer. 
And then new aspects of the thing would emerge — this or that 
must be reconsidered ; the suggestion, which Socrates has dropped 
with half an apology for mentioning the notion, involves — it is 
so difficult to say quite what it involves. " Somehow or other, 
Socrates, there seems to me to be truth in what you say. But 
I feel like most people ; I don't quite believe you." ^ He gave 
a constant stimulus to thought — '* the unexamined life," he 
said, *' was really un-live-able for a human being." ^ " God 
has sent me," so Plato represents him as saying in the Apology,^ 
" to attack the city, as if it were a great and noble horse, to 
use a quaint simile, which was rather sluggish from its size, 
and which needed to be aroused by a gadfly : and I think that 
I am the gadfly that God has sent to the city to attack it ; 
for I never cease from settling upon you, as it were, from every 
point, and rousing, and exhorting, and reproaching each man 
of you all day long." The part of gadfly which he had to 
play made him unpopular — " the more I read about him," 
wrote Macaulay, '* the less I wonder they poisoned him." * 

The fascination of Socrates is described by Alcibiades in 
the Symposium.^ " My heart leaps within me and my eyes 
rain tears when I hear his words. And I observe that many 
others are affected in the same manner. I have heard Pericles 
and other great orators, and I thought they spoke well, but I 
never had any similar feeling ; my soul was not stirred by them, 
nor was I angry at the thought of my own slavish state. But 
this Marsyas [he means Socrates] has often brought me to 
such a pass that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the 
life which I am leading. He makes me admit that with great 
needs of my own, I neglect my self while I am busy with the 
affairs of the Athenians. He is the only person who has ever 
made me ashamed — and you might not think it was in my 
nature to feel shame before any one, but I feel it before him 

1 Gorg. 513c. 2 Plato, ApoL 38A. 

3 Plato, Apol. 30E (F. J. Church). * Life of Macaulay, ii. 436. 

6 Plato, Symp. 215E and following, somewhat abridged. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON i8i 

and him alone. For I know I cannot answer him or say I 
ought not to do as he bids. So I run away. Often I should 
be glad to see him gone and no more among men ; but if that 
happened, I know I should be more troubled than ever." 
Both Plato and Xenophon emphasize again and again the 
kindness he showed to young men — how interested he was in 
them, what a delightful companion he was and how wise a 
friend. Like Samuel Johnson, he " loved the young dogs of 
this age,'' and was ready '' to come and have a frolick with 
them."^ He talked with them, read with them,^ made fun 
of them, inspired them, and made life a new and a richer thing 
for them. 

Of his influence on the thought of Greece through his 
pupils of a more philosophic type, I have not to speak. Xeno- 
phon was essentially not of the speculative habit — indeed, 
as a French critic suggests, it is only his love of Socrates that 
leads him to put a little philosophy in one of his books.^ Even 
so it was to some purpose ; for we are told that a century 
later a young man, lean, long and dusky, came from a Phoe- 
nician town in Cyprus with a cargo of purple to the Peiraieus ; 
that he went up to Athens, and sat down in a bookshop, and 
picked up the Second Book of the Memorabilia and read it with 
such pleasure that he asked the bookseller where such men 
could be found ; that Crates passed and the bookseller said, 
'' Follow him " ; and so Zeno was enHsted in the study of 
philosophy, to the lasting good of the ancient world.* Of allj 
schools the Stoic was the most practical, and in his book! 
Xenophon lays all the stress on the practical worth of Socratesi 
teaching — its bearing on life, its steady trend to self-government 
and to respect for other men and for the State. 

Summing up briefly what Socrates did for Xenophon and 
others of his build, and leaving Plato and Antisthenes and 
their sort on one side, we may say that Socrates set them think- 
ing — that his " gadfly " quality came in here and made it 
impossible for them to live a wholly " unexamined " life. 
He taught them self-criticism and he insisted on knowledge. 
*' Did you go yourself and examine this, or how do you know ? " 

1 Boswell, Life of Johnson (ed. Birkbeck Hill), i. p. 445. 

2 Mem. i. 6, 14. » Croiset, XSnophon, p. 94. 
* Diogenes Laertius, vii. i, 1-3. 



i82 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

he asks Glaucon.^ *' Oh, I guess," said he. " Very well," 
rejoined Socrates, " about this matter also — when we are no 
longer guessing, but actually know — shall we defer discussion 
till then?" "Perhaps it would be better," said Glaucon. 
" Euthydemos," ^ said Socrates, " were you ever at Delphi ? " 
" Yes, certainly ; twice." " Did you notice the inscription 
somewhere in the temple, * Know Thyself ' ? " Yes, he had 
seen it. Had he paid any attention to it, or really tried to get 
a good look at himself to see what he was ? No, he hadn't ; 
he thought he knew already. And Socrates has his text, and 
makes the young man realize how much self-examination 
means ; and after that Euthydemos *' realized that he would 
never be a man worth while, unless he consorted with Socrates ; 
so he never left him except when necessary, and he used to 
imitate him too in some ways. And when Socrates saw how 
he felt, with the minimum of worry and the utmost simplicity 
and clearness he used to initiate him into what he held most 
needful to know and to do." ^ 

Above all he laid the emphasis on things human ; he could 
not understand how people would discuss " the nature of all 
things," — the " cosmos, as the sophists call it," — and the 
laws that govern the heavenly bodies — and the One and Many 
and the Flux, and so on. For himself he preferred themes 
that bore on human life — what is piety or impiety ? beauty ? 
ugliness ? right and wrong ? sophrosyne ? madness ? a state, 
a citizen, rule or a ruler of men ? * His influence made many 
desire virtue, and he held out hopes to them, that, if they 
would take heed to themselves, they would be kaloi kdgathoi — 
he never promised to teach them that, but he was conspicuously 
one himself, and so he led them to hope that by copying him 
they might become so.^ He made good citizens of them, 
he emphasized respect for the city's law, he taught them how 
to be good friends, to be kind and pure and pious. So says 
Xenophon in passage after passage, in plain language which 
anybody could understand ; and Plato in his richer and 
wonderful way says the same. And the significance of this 
was very great, for it was a reply to the sophistic upset of 
all decency, loyalty, and society. He was laying foundations 

1 Mem. iii. 6, lo-ii. ^ Mem. iv. 2, 24. ^ Mem. iv. 2, 40. 

* Mem. i. i, 11, 16. ^ Mem. i. 2. 2. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 183 

anew on which human life might rest, and laying them for 
ever, for now they should rest, not on tradition unexamined, 
but on knowledge, thorough, deep-going, and proven. Like 
Kant, as Eduard Meyer suggests, — like Goethe, as Carlyle 
emphasizes, — he overcame scepticism by going through with 
it, by criticism. And he knew the strength of the sophists' 
position ; he knew the impulse of desire, so he owned, and 
had only overcome it by battle.^ 

Perhaps the greater the teacher, the more divergence there 
will be among his pupils, as one and the other seizes and em- 
phasizes different aspects of truth which he himself has held 
together in some synthesis thought-out or instinctive. There 
were among Socrates' followers those who were led to as 
thoroughgoing an individualism as the ancient world ever 
saw. His emphasis on knowledge meant the individual — 
not quite as the sophists had taught, but still it was a fair 
deduction from " Know Thyself." The stress which Socrates 
laid on ethical knowledge — even virtue without knowledge 
of itself was hardly virtue at all for him — required that every 
man should consciously direct and organize his own life by 
his own light of reason. The corrective lay in that reference 
of life to the divine will which, Xenophon again and again 
insists, was his constant teaching — the use of divination and 
sacrifice. " KaBBvvafjutv 8' epSeiv — there is no better motto," 
he used to say, referring to the line of Hesiod : 

Kabbvvafiiv 8' epdeiv lip* ddavdroicn OeolcTi — 
Give all thou canst in sacrifice to heaven. ^ 

Xenophon seems to harp upon this string with a purpose, and 
it is easy to see that he had in mind the accusation of impiety 
which had brought his death on Socrates. The First Book of 
the Memorabilia is very much a defence against the charges 
of Anytos and Meletos and the popular beliefs on which they 
rested. Yet the same note of reference to the divine is sounded 
in Plato's Apology, Sind there remains the famous "divine sign." ^ 

^ Cicero, Tusc. Disput. iv. 37, 80, Cum ilia {sc. vitia) sihi insita, sed 
ratione a se dejecta dicer et. 

2 Mem. i. 3, 2, quoting Hesiod, Works and Days, 336. I hope the 
Wordsworthian echo helps out the sense. 

' See E. Caird, Evolution of Theology, i. 72 ; J. Adam, Gifford 
Lectures, p. 322 ; J. T. Forbes, Socrates, p. 223, an interesting discussion 
of modern explanations. 



i84 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

In the present state of psychological knowledge — or inquiry, 
perhaps, it should be called — ^he would be a bold man w^ho 
would dogmatize on the nature of this " sign," to Bai/uLovLov. 
Plutarch and Apuleius knew perfectly well what it was ; but 
their knowledge is outworn. But it may certainly be said 
that the credit of Socrates' " sign," whatever its precise nature, 
never stood higher. It will not now be so readily put down 
to delusion or imposture as once. If a more or less English 
word is any help in such a case, a word with suggestion rather 
than definite or precise signification, that word would be 
intuition ; — but until we know more about intuition, we had 
better use the word only tentatively ; and it was so, we might 
expect, that Socrates used his neuter adjective, half turned 
into substantive by the definite article. In any case, man 
was not for Socrates " mere man," and his pupil perhaps was 
not merely translating for himself — it is most likely that he 
was honestly quoting — when he drove home the lesson of 
divination and sacrifice on the lines laid down by the State and 
by Greek belief generally.^ 

As for the old myths, which Pindar toned down and 
Aeschylus re-interpreted and which Euripides so relentlessly 
re-stated in the old terms with the terrible contrast of a new 
setting — it would seem that teacher and pupil let them drop. 
Piety lay in rite and faith and obedience, not in old tales.^ 
What Euripides would have said to Plato's new myths was 
written a generation earlier in the Hippolytus — myths take 
us nowhere — 

fivOois 8' aXXcos (})€p6ixeorBa,^ 

The fact that this signal movement back to religion followed 
the age of questioning is worth study, for it was not a blind 
reaction at all, nor a semi-political matter as in 1815. 

In other ways the influence of Socrates upon Xenophon 
must have been considerable. Socrates was a critic of Demo- 
cracy — a believer in the expert. He was given to praising 
Sparta and Crete as well-governed.* It was made a point 

^ Mem. i. 3, i, vofxa ttoXccos, as the Pythian priestess also taught. 

2 Oracles perhaps did not regain quite their old place. Xenophon's 
description of Diopeithes as fidXa xp'?o-/>toXoyos dvrjp {Hellenica, iii. 3, 3) is 
curious. The ixaka is a surprise. 

3 Hippolytus, 1^7. * Plato, Cvito, 52E. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 185 

against him ^ that he taught his friends to despise the estab- 
lished laws by insisting that it was folly for the city to choose 
its rulers or archons by lot — nobody would wish to sail upon 
a ship where the pilot was drawn by lot, or to employ a car- 
penter so chosen, or even a flute player ; such language was 
bound to set the young up to despise the constitution. Here 
the accuser touched a live issue — a great many people had at 
one time or other played with the idea of abolishing lot — it had 
been attempted, and it was a recognized method of subverting 
Democracy. Xenophon, as we have seen, belonged perhaps 
to a family whose sympathies were only doubtfully popular ; 
and his teacher's views appealed to him, as we can see in the 
supposed discussion of Socrates with the younger Pericles 
where the Areopagus is praised — " can you name any similar 
body trying cases and doing other business with more honour, 
legality, dignity, or justice ? " ^ Why, asks Socrates in 
another chapter, should you be afraid to speak before cobblers 
and carpenters and coppersmiths, when you can discuss things 
without nervousness before the first men of the city ? ^ This 
question, we read, was addressed to Charmides, a relative of 
Plato and of Critias, to encourage him to embark on political 
life. This Charmides did, and he lost his life fighting to the 
last to prevent the return of Thrasybulus and the democrats. 
It almost looks like a change of plan between Books I and III 
of the Memorabilia, for such a chapter was hardly likely to 
clear the memory of Socrates with readers among the group of 
Anytos. For Anytos, though better known as the accuser of 
Socrates, was one of Thrasybulus' patriot band.* 

One of the hardest things to do when we study Socrates' 
relations with his pupils, or the Greek drama in the hands of 
Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, is to remember steadily 
that Athens was engaged in the most dreadful of her wars all 
the time. If Xenophon talked with Socrates or listened to 
him whenever he got the chance, it is certain that he must 
have done some kind of military service every summer of the 
last ten years of the Peloponnesian War, unless the story is 
true that he was for a time a prisoner in Thebes. Where he 
served and in what battles he fought, it would be vain to try 

1 Mem. i. 2, 9. 2 Mem. iii. 5, 20. ^ Mem. iii. 7, 6. 

* For Anytos and his attitude to Socrates, see Chapter IX. p. 276. 



i86 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

to guess. Perhaps if the tradition be true that he was in the 
knights, he may have been occupied with cavalry work in 
Attica itself. Cavalry at all events was throughout life his 
chief military interest. 

In 411 Athens was subjected to the futile and bloody 
revolution associated with the name of the Four Hundred. 
It was the reflex of the Athenian catastrophe in Sicily in 413 — 
there must be retrenchment of expenses in the city, some 
steadier and more responsible system of government than 
that of snap votes in the Ecclesia and random oratory. After 
the manner of a democracy, says Thucydides,^ they were very 
amenable to discipline while their fright lasted. Probouloi 
were appointed — a council of ten elder men to advise and 
guide. The device was a familiar oligarchic one, used in 
Dorian cities, and described by Aristotle in after years as 
definitely " not democratic.'' ^ Among them were Hagnon, 
father of Theramenes, and perhaps Sophocles. ^ We need not 
follow the agonizing struggle — wonderfully successful — to get a 
fleet launched and manned and to maintain the war against 
Sparta ; nor need we go into the details of the oligarchic plot, 
planned with one set of notions and carried through for another. 
Two things stand out. The people of Athens disliked the 
new plan from the outset — a modified democracy {fjurj top 
avTov TpoTTov ^7)^oKpaTovfjLevoi^) had a suspicious sound ; but 
it was a case of duress — can you carry on the war without 
the help of the King of the Persians ? The other thing 
is the amount of preparation, if we may so call it, for the 
change. The pamphlet of the Athenian Oligarch of the 
year 424, handed down to us among Xenophon's works, 
shows what would have been wished but was so far impossible 
in the judgment of that very acute observer. Clubs and 
groups of persons dissatisfied with the constitution had grown 
up and organized themselves as the war went on — " for the 
management of trials and elections." * The '' constitution of 

^ Thuc. viii. i. ^ Aristotle, Pol. iv. 12, 8 ; vi. 5, 13. 

3 Lysias, 12, c. Erat. § 65. See p. 128. 

* Thuc. viii. 53; Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 577. Isocrates, Paneg. 
79, gives the clubs in retrospect a high patriotic colour. E. Meyer, 
Gesch. des Alt. iv. §696, gives a list of men of note who favoured a 
modified democracy. Plato, Theaet. 17 3D, adds dinner and avXrjTpides 
to the political interests of these clubs. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 187 

our fathers " was the catchword, irdrpio^ iroXnela, democracy 
as Solon and Cleisthenes had conceived it, before the radical 
innovations of those fifty years of commerce and maritime 
empire and rule by an unbridled ecclesia had brought the land 
to war and ruin — democracy with an Areopagus to guide and 
discipline it — a democracy of men with a stake in the country, 
men who could provide their own arms for its service, and no 
more state pay for the citizen functions of legislation and 
administration of justice. The abolition of state pay meant 
unmistakably the exclusion of the poorer classes, the con- 
stituents of the Cleons and Hyperboluses. All this was in the 
air, and the dreadful blunder of the Sicilian Expedition and its 
appalling failure won adherents for the idea who might never 
otherwise have considered it. 

Whether Gryllos and his son Xenophon took any part in 
the change of constitution one way or the other, we do not 
know. Gryllos, of course, may have been dead for all we can 
tell. It is not impossible that the young Xenophon, with / 
his small attachment to democracy, may have favoured the / 
movement — may have taken a hand in it. He was about;/ 
twenty years old, and, tradition says, a knight. Thucydides|| 
twice speaks of the services of a body of " young men " — 1* 
almost using it as a technical term. There is a curious question 
in one place as to the text — as it stands it reads " a hundred 
and twenty Hellenic youth (EXkr^ve^ veavla-fcoi) whose 
services they [the conspirators] used for any act of violence they 
had in hand." ^ Hellenes is the doubtful word, but hardly a 
word that anyone but the historian himself would have thought 
of inserting ; but what does it mean ? Does it mean the 
youths were not Scythian bowmen, police and the like ? — a 
dull suggestion ; or were the Hellenic Youth, like the Young 
Turks of to-day, and Young England of Disraeli's days, a 
political party, actual or half-actual and half -ideal ? When the 
tumult takes place which ends in the demoHtion of the fort of 
Eetioneia and the overthrow of the Four Hundred in favour of 
Theramenes and the " Five Thousand,'* one of the figures on 
the scene mentioned by Thucydides is Aristarchos. Thucy- 

1 Thuc. viii. 69, 4 ; x^^povpyclu is a euphemism of grim associations. 
NeavicrKot in Aristophanes, Knights, 730, on which see R. A. 
Neil's note. 



i88 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

dides does not often mention men idly or by accident, and he 
adds that Aristarchos had " certain young knights " with him 
{t(ov iiTTricov veavla-KOi).^ The anger of Theramenes at the 
destruction of the fort was recognized as diplomatic, and it 
soon ended in the popular movement for the " Five Thousand "; 
" but Aristarchos and the opponents were angry in earnest," 
though to no purpose. Aristarchos is a sinister figure ; for, 
some days later, when he and his confederates had to fly, he 
did his country a final disservice in betraying Oinoe to the 
Boeotians. 2 On this occasion he had with him " certain archers 
— of the most barbarian kind " ; and what superlative bar- 
barians they were, Thracian or Scythian or whatever more 
barbarous there was, we are left to guess. The young men 
(veavl(TKot) reappear with short swords at that meeting of 
the Thirty in council in 404, which ended in the killing of 
Theramenes, 3 and once more it is believed they were knights, — 
for knights were at all events in the service of the Thirty against 
Thrasybulus,* — unless we are content to render it merely as 
cavalry, though what other cavalry the Thirty could have 
it is hard to see. Eduard Meyer remarks that Xenophon re- 
cords the events and especially the feeling and procedure of the 
knights with the liveliest recollection.^ Grote recognizes a 
certain sympathy in Xenophon as historian, but neither he nor 
Beloch quite says that Xenophon served in the knights for the 
Thirty. 

That the knights were throughout of the oligarchic party — 
of the party at least opposed to extreme democracy and in 
favour of its modification — is intelligible and is established. 
That Xenophon served among them is a conjecture — possible 
enough, but a conjecture still. That he sympathized with 
the ideal of modified democracy — if democracy there must 
be — is very likely. But as to his part in the events of 411, 
even as to his presence in Attica at all — we have absolutely 
no evidence whatever. The oligarchy of 404 is another matter, 

1 Thuc. viii. 92. 

2 Thuc. viii. 98. Aristarchos, somehow or other, was brought to 
trial for this betrayal, and, it was remembered, was given the full 
advantage of the laws in self-defence on the occasion (Xen. Hellenica, 
i. 7, 28). 

3 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 23. * Xen. Hellenica, ii. 4, 10. 
^ E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. % 7 $7, 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 189 

for our knowledge of it is chiefly drawn from Xenophon himself, 
and his account of it is one of the most vivid sections of his 
Hellenica — so vivid, that, forgetting how brilliantly Thucydides 
can describe scenes which he never saw, at Plataea or Pylos, 
our critics are certain that Xenophon was in Athens, or in 
Attica somewhere, throughout the whole stormy time. 

Xenophon in ever memorable words describes the arrival 
in Athens of the news of the crowning disaster of Aegospotami 
— the night when no man slept. Such an experience, and all j 
the dreadful events between that night and the final peace-! 
making of the parties in Athens on the expulsion of the Thirty, \ 
could not but affect the mind and spirit of a man gifted with 
any feeling at all. The long fight against famine, when the 
corn trade route was finally held by the enemy — the anxiety 
as to what the conquerors would do with the captive city 
and people — the dragging negotiations of Theramenes — the 
humiliation — the loss of empire, walls, and even docks — the 
Thirty tyrants, and the killing of fifteen hundred people by 
them — experiences of this kind write themselves down in 
character. Life becomes another thing, and the man who 
looks out on it is changed for ever. 

Sparta did not andrapodize Athens — kill the grown men 
and sell the women and children and blot out the city ; but 
her decision had to be waited for. Lysander was capable of 
anything, and the Thebans and Corinthians urged it, men 
said.^ One wonders if any in those days of waiting remembered 
Euripides' Trojan Women, and how it was given on the stage 
in 415, and read it again with a new understanding. Athens 
was spared, and historians have written of the nobility and 
magnanimity of Sparta. Eduard Meyer suggests that the 
fact that Athens was the centre of the spiritual life of Greece 
may have weighed ; but Sparta rarely showed any sign of 
caring for anything of the kind.^ More weight would be 
attached by the Spartans to the problem of what to do with 

^ Hellenica, ii. 2, 19. Cf. the treatment of Acragas in 406 by the 
Carthaginians (Diod. Sic. xiii. 89, 90) — a city of 200,000 people. 

2 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 20, says the Spartans refused to destroy 
a city '- that had done good service in the greatest dangers that had 
ever come on Greece." So Andocides, i. 142. When one recalls Lichas, 
Callicratidas, and King Pausanias, it becomes more credible that Sparta 
was in some degree amenable to such considerations. 



iQo FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Attica and the great haven if Athens were deleted. Perhaps 
it was not hard to understand the Theban desire to see this 
done, and " to leave the land for the grazing of sheep like 
the Crisaean plain." If Thebes did not gain the vacant 
territory, would it be Corinth — or Megara ? In any case, it 
could not be incorporated in Laconia. Fewest questions 
would be raised, and fewest dangers incurred, if Athens were 
left — left crippled, helpless, and enslaved under domestic 
tyrants. And here we reach the story of the Thirty. 

Till the discovery of the Aristotelian Athenian Constitution, 
Xenophon's narrative went unchallenged, supported as it 
was in most particulars by the almost contemporary speeches 
of Lysias and the references of Isocrates, Athenians all and 
*' of years to remark what happened." But the new book 
has another version of the events, and perhaps its novelty 
or the glitter of Aristotle's name dazzled for a while a number 
of historians. It is very far from being a satisfactory piece 
of historical work. Not to leave the period which concerns 
us, the ** constitution of Draco " was seen from the first to 
be an absurdity and probably the product of some pen of 
411 or 404. The narrative of the Four Hundred contradicted 
Thucydides on the question, a crucial one : were or were not 
the Five Thousand really constituted before the Four Hundred 
fell ? Aristotle, if it be he, says they were ; Thucydides that 
they were not. Aristotle details the procedure, with such 
care that a German scholar could hold that " no transforma- 
tion was ever so legally done *' ; but, as Eduard Meyer saw,^ 
Aristotle omitted the real aspects of the revolution to depend 
on acta, or on the editor of acta.^ And then, after saying, 
in chapter 30, that the Five Thousand were chosen, in 
chapter 32 he adds that it was " only in word " — i.e. 
they were chosen, only they really weren't. Meyer's vindica- 
tion of Thucydides is generally accepted.^ When we come 
to the Thirty, we find history still more thoroughly re- written. 
The order of events familiar to us in Xenophon's pages was 
this : — ist : the introduction of a garrison of seven hundred 

1 E. Meyer, Forsch. ii. pp. 406-436. 

2 '-As false as a bulletin," we are told, was a proverb of Napoleon's 
time. 

^ Even by Mr. E. M. Walker, Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, p. 114. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 191 

men under the Spartan Callibios, followed by wholesale killing 
of opponents and the disarming of the people ; 2nd : the 
remonstrance of Theramenes and his violent end, followed by 
more massacre, and the flight of citizens till refugees filled 
Megara and Thebes ; 3rd : the occupation of Phyle by 
Thrasybulus. The new book inverts the order, and gives : — 
ist : the return of Thrasybulus ; 2nd : the death of Thera- 
menes ; 3rd : the disarming of the people, heightened savagery, 
and the garrison.^ On what authority, for Aristotle w^as 
not yet born ? That would appear to have been some book 
or pamphlet, written apparently to vindicate Theramenes. 
Whether it is the judgment of Aristotle himself, or merely 
transcribed, the Constitution picks out as the best of Athenian 
politicians, " after the old (or ancient) ones " — a curiously 
careless phrase — Nicias, Thucydides the son of Melesias, and 
Theramenes. The author of this selection knows the slander 
against Theramenes as wrecker of every constitution — but, 
no ! he says, Theramenes really tried to keep each constitution 
in turn away from the course of injustice ; he showed the 
aptitude of an ideal good citizen to live under any constitution, 
and it was his resistance to illegality that won him ill will.^ 
It might fairly be asked, whether anyone would guess from 
the Constitution that Theramenes had been, as we know he 
was, one of the Thirty at all.^ 

It is not till we read the speeches of Lysias against 
Eratosthenes and Agoratos that we realize the furious hatred 
men felt for Theramenes ; and then, as we put together one 
or two remarks of Thucydides with the enthusiastic praise 
of Aristotle's anonymous authority, we begin to see what 
lies behind. Thucydides says that Theramenes was capable 
in speech and judgment ; * and he gives, as we have seen, 
a remarkable eulogy to the fugitive constitution labelled 

^ The order of Xenophon is accepted by E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. 
V. § 749, and by Beloch, Gv. Gesch. ii. p. 1 16. 

2 A^. Uo\. 28, 5. 

' And while we are asking questions, why does the author omit 
to state that Critias also was one of the Thirty ? Is it deference to the 
school of Socrates ? 

* Thuc. viii. 62>, 4. Cf. Aristophanes, Frogs, 967 ff., where Euripides 
is made to claim him with pride as a pupil, "a man who can always 
get out of a mess." 



192 



FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



nowadays with that statesman's name.^ Theramenes repre- 
sented the party of modified democracy — ^of the impossible ; 
and Aristotle is following the lead of one of his adherents, 
who, perhaps some time after the events, wrote an account 
of them which, in the unobtrusive way of a good party 
pamphlet, readjusted facts, and, by this simple form of appccd 
to history, cleared the fame of the great man associated with the 
ideal of ancestral or modified democracy. The Spartan garrison, 
he would have us think, was really fetched in after the death 
of Theramenes, so that he was not responsible for it, nor for 
the debt of a hundred talents to Sparta incurred by those who 
hired it and left by them for the democracy of the restora- 
tion to repay. The killing of Theramenes thus almost becomes 
a reply to the occupation of Phyle, a death for the People. 

Now let the reader look at the speeches of Lysias, a con- 
temporary, a resident, and a man ruined by the Thirty. 
Lysias, it is true, is angry and eager for revenge, which it 
would seem the court did not give him — but he is addressing 
men who had lived through the actual events, only two or 
three years away ; men open to insinuations, but as well aware 
as himself of the actual course of events. The situation 
precludes major falsifications, and it gives the real atmosphere. 

Then turn to Xenophon. Xenophon, as a historian, is 
admittedly careless, and he will omit things when he so pleases. 
He does like the Spartans and he does not like the Thebans, 
and omissions due to both feelings can be charged against 
him. But the more I read him, and the more I study what 
is made of his work by the scholars who have given to it 
the closest care and scrutiny, the more convinced I am that 
there is no ground for accusing him of deliberate falsification. 
Wrong impressions his carelessness will produce, and some- 
times his party feeling ; but in the latter case most often 
the thing corrects itself. To come then to Theramenes, and 
to suppose for the moment that Xenophon wishes to mislead 
us — in which direction will it be ? Is he likely to falsify 
history out of sympathy with the party of Lysias, with the 
more furious end of the extreme democrats ? Or with the 
moderates, whose spokesman supplied Aristotle's information ? 
We have seen that, if we can at all divine what his party 
1 Thuc. viii. 97, 2. See Chapter III. p. yS. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 193 

politics were, he leaned to this side himself. But his story, 
as we have it, clashes with the moderate's version. Then 
he blundered and forgot ? One would have thought it 
impossible to read the clear, vivid narrative, thrilling with 
the spirit of the eyewitness, and suggest such a thing. Does 
he or does he not make a hero of Theramenes ? Or does he 
nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice ? He quite 
openly shows Theramenes' connexion with Lysander — his 
long delay in the Spartan camp, while the siege of Athens 
dragged on for three interminable months of famine ^ — ^his 
part in the tragic surrender to Sparta — and he definitely 
names him among the Thirty. He does not attack him in 
the envenomed spirit of Lysias for his share in the establish- 
ment of the Thirty ; and, by the time Theramenes is killed, 
he leaves the reader with a friendly feeling for the man — a 
feeling shared, it is clear, by many contemporaries who felt 
there was something in the death at least that was loyal 
and patriotic, that in a sense redeemed the life. Many felt 
this, as we can see ; for Lysias protests fiercely against the 
notion that Theramenes died for the Athenians. It is very 
hard to find partisanship in the story told by Xenophon, 
or slovenliness. It makes the impression of the record of a . 
candid and honourable witness, on whose mind were deeply! 1 
and indelibly engraved the actual events of the most awful 
days in his country's history.^ There are things a man cannot 
live through and forget. 

It must have been with curious feelings that the pupil of 
Socrates found that the ruling spirit of the Thirty was another 
member of the school. Alcibiades had had his day, and now Cri- 
tias ruled, pupil but hardly follower of Socrates. ^ Poet, thinker, 
orator, and adventurer, this man had been banished, thanks to 
Cleophon, who, it is said, had enough culture to quote a telling 
line of Solon against him, written for his ancestor long ago : 

eiTTefievai Kpirirj ^avdorpixi trarpos aKOveiv — 
Bid Critias of the yellow liair obey his sire.* 

* Read Xenophon's account of it, Hellenica, ii. 2, 21. 

2 E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 749, holds it unthinkable that Xeno- 
phon, who was an eyewitness and in the Knights, could have falsely 
set the calling in of the garrison before the death of Theramenes. 

' See Mem. i. i and 2. * Aristotle, Rhetoric, i. 1375. 

13 



194 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

An aristocrat in exile, he had employed himself in a rebellion 
of serfs against the rulers of Thessaly. He had come back 
with the exile's usual idea of vengeance,^ but perhaps already 
Cleophon had been hustled out of the world by a judicial 
murder. But, for all his brain and energy, he was an impossible 
ruler, and he had as his colleague the most brilliant politician 
after Alcibiades of the decade — Theramenes, the adroitest of all 
moderates, the " buskin " that fitted all parties, who always 
played for his own hand and always saw the moment to change 
sides successfully, a natural traitor. ^ Theramenes saw that the 
violence of Critias was doing no good — ^it was not sense to kill 
men whom the demos regarded, at least if they did the kaloi 
kdgathoi no harm ; even an oligarchy needed some kind of 
partners ; and so he became suspect. The populace was dis- 
armed and the garrison was got in ; the rulers were free to kill 
more victims, and they began to include the metics, the resident 
aliens of the commercial community — which was folly, as Thera- 
menes saw, and he said so. So they resolved to be rid of him, 
and they had him killed, as Critias planned, but it cost a good 
deal. He made a defence that was remembered ; he fought 
for his life, and was dragged shouting across the agora — every- 
body saw and knew — and then with the hemlock his gaiety of 
spirit triumphed, and he died with a jest that went down to 
posterity as a signal exhibition of character and as a fulfilled 
prophecy. Critias, beside writing of the origin of the gods, 
had written a poem on the familiar game Kottahos ; so Thera- 
menes, when he had drunk off the cup, jerked out the last drops, 
with the gay challenge : " For Critias let this be, for Critias 
the noble ! " — " I know well," wrote Xenophon at this point, 
" that such sayings are scarcely worth recording, but I count 
it an admirable trait in the man, that, with death so near, 
neither his sense nor his humour deserted him.'* ^ All Athens, 
we may be sure, heard the tale at once, and thought it over. 
And then came news indeed — Thrasybulus had occupied 
Phyle,* an old hill fort on one of the two significant passes over 

1 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 15. Cf. Diod. Sic. xiii. 92 (end), in what spirit 
the Syracusan exiles would come back — for killings and confiscations. 

2 See speech of Critias, Hellenica, ii. 3, 24-34. 
" Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 56. 

* See J. P. Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece, ch. viii. 



THE YOUTH OF XENOPHON 195 

the mountains between Attica and Boeotia, between Parnes 
and Cithaeron. He was a democrat leader, who had refused 
a place in the Thirty, and now he came with a band of the 
refugees from Thebes. Here I would quote with pleasure 
from Mrs. R. C. Bosariquet's charming book, Days in Attica. 

"As a post of observation its position is unequalled. No 
boats could slip across the Saronic Gulf, no force of Athenians 
muster in the plain, no band attempt the passes of Hymettus, 
but the watchman at Phyle would see the lowering of the sail 
or the light glinting on the spears of moving men. The whole 
of the Cephissian plain from Phalerum to Pentelicus lies in 
view, clear as an illuminated missal, in spite of the well of air, 
two thousand five htmdred feet in depth, that swims between. 
Athens can be seen, but it looks only a group of infinitesimal 
dots and lines. Without the aid of opera-glasses I have made 
out the dark rectangular outline of the Acropolis, the lighter 
pyramidal form of the Parthenon, and the white gleaming 
houses of the town. The Bay of Salamis is clear, though 
Piraeus is hidden behind hills. What a fine move of Thrasy- 
bulus to come up to this eyrie and wait for the moment when 
he could sweep eagle-like on his prey, to deliver the city from 
the tyrants ! '* 

For the Garibaldi-like story that follows — the fight in 
the snowstorm, the surprise of the guards of the Thirty, the 
seizure of the Peiraieus, the victory of Munychia, the gallant 
death of the prophet, the fall of Critias, and all the shifting 
movements of Thirty and Ten, the City and Peiraieus parties, 
the coming of the Spartans again, and the overriding of 
Lysander by King Pausanias — let the reader go to Xenophon 
himself and read with feeling and intelligence — and then say 
where Xenophon' s sympathies lay, whether they are not where 
his own must lie. When did he write the story ? Many guesses 
have been made, but the indications are not enough to leave us 
sure. It does not matter greatly. What concerns us is that 
here is a tale of heroes, and Xenophon has that native instinct 
for heroism that makes the telling of it a joy to him, and leaves 
a story that cannot die. 

The man has lived through a great deal. From the open- 
air pleasures and interests of the country deme, he has come to 
Athens and learnt to love Socrates, and found in his friendship 



196 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

a stimulus that shaped Hf e for him ; he has served his country 
in battle, he has felt with her in her fall and gone through the 
night of anguish with her ; ^ he has seen how far astray the most 
cultured and brilliant of men can go, how hopeless any govern- 
ment is that does not carry the people with it, that neglects the 
fundamental ancient distinction between right and wrong ; 
he has given up the idea of modified democracy, ancestral 
constitutions, and other notions of the study and the clique ; 
he has seen heroism again in its simplest and manliest forms, 
ar^d the great spectacle of a people reunited ; and he ends his 
tale for the time being with the quiet and significant words — 
" So they swore oaths that they would remember no evil, and to 
this day they live together in one state, and Demos abides by 
his oaths." 

One question remains, if anyone care to ask it. Among 
the exiles who came back in 404 was an old man, who had not 
seen Athens for twenty years — a man with perhaps a dash of 
foreign accent, pedantic a little, something of an archaist, a 
^moderate in politics, in thought and mind and utterance a man 
/ of the old regime, busy still with a history at which he had 
been working for years, but which he had not finished. Legend 
says that Xenophon rescued that history or part of it from 
destruction ; he certainly wrote an ending for it — a piece of 
work in which his natural gifts are battling, whether he knew 
it or not, with a great influence. 2 How came he under that 
influence ? Was it one of style only, or did Xenophon meet 
Thucydides ? 

* I cannot make anything of the remark of Hemardinquer, La 
Cyvopedie, p. 10, that • - Xenophon est sec dans les Hellenica sur la 
mine d'Ath^nes et presque joyeux." 

2 See Bruns, Lit. Portrdf, pp. 38 ff. 



CHAPTER VII 
PERSIA 

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep 
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep ; 
And Bahram, that great Hunter — the Wild Ass 
Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep. 

SO runs, in its familiar English garb, the stanza of one of 
the great mediaeval poets of Persia. And in one of those 
courts Mr. E. G. Browne copied down a similar reflec- 
tion, written there in 1 791-2 : " Where," asked the writer, in 
Arabic verse, " are the proud monarchs of yore ? They multi- 
plied treasures which endured not, neither did they endure.*' ^ 
The two moralists between them bring out how transitory is 
fame. Takht-i-Jamshid (Throne of Jamshid) is the modern 
name of Persepolis,^ and Jamshid, it would appear, is a mere 
hero of legend.^ Bahram, that great Hunter, was a king of the 
Sasanian house that held Persia for four centuries (a.d. 226-651) 
and fought with the Roman Empire till the deluge of 
Islam came and swept them away.* The great builder of 
Persepolis was Darius, and yet it would seem that he and 
C5n:us and the whole Achaemenian dynastj^ have passed from 
the national memory and imagination. What the West 
knows of them it has learnt for itself from their monuments 
and from what their enemies, the Greeks, told of them. Of all 

^ E. G. Browne, A Year amongst the Persians, p. 254. 

^ E. G. Browne, Literary History of Persia, p. 112. 

^ Jam-shid or Jam is the Yima of the Avesta, and Yama of the 
Hindu mythology. He is a demigod, belonging to a period before 
Indians and Persians separated. 

* Bahram is, I think, the Varanes V (a.d. 420-440) of the diction- 
aries, " surnamed Gour, or the Wild Ass, on account of his passion 
for the chase of that animal " — a passion which Xenophon, at least, 
would forgive to a king (cf. Anab. i. 5, 2; Cyrop. viii. i, 2>^. Cf. 

Chapter VIII. p. 246). 

197 



igS FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the world-empires before Rome's, that of the Achaemenians 
was most significant for mankind, and in more ways than 
one. Our present task is Greek history, but Greek history 
at the period under review is not to be understood apart from 
the Persian Empire. 

Persia has contributed to the progress of mankind both 
by what she has done and by what she failed to do. The 
Persian tried to conquer the Greek and failed, and by the 
attempt and the failure brought out the grandeur of Hellas 
and gave the Hellen a glad self-consciousness, in the strength 
of which those triumphs were won which the world associates 
with the Greek name, and which have done so much to make 
the world. Even such an involuntary contribution to history 
is enough to entitle Persia to a more sympathetic study than 
she usually receives. They were no common foes who called 
into being all that Greece had of genius and power. In spirit, 
in courage, in character, the best of the Greeks recognized the 
Persians to be their peers. But in positive achievement the 
Persian also set new ideals before mankind — ideals to which 
indeed he did not himself attain, but which he left to Mace- 
donian and Roman — ideals for the world's good government 
with the utmost of unity and cohesion combined with the 
largest possible freedom for the development of race and 
individual within the larger organism. An Indo-European 
people with great gifts, which in some degree they still keep, 
the Persians break upon the West with a series of surprises. 
In antiquity they first conceived and constructed a world- 
empire that should last. Then for six centuries they are 
governed by foreigners, Macedonian and Parthian, but they rise 
again to a new national life, only too significant for the West. 
In the Middle Ages they produce the only Oriental poets who 
have much influenced the thought and literature of the 
European peoples. In religion their story is as interesting. 
In their early day we see rise among them one of the world's 
great prophets, Zoroaster. It is now no longer held proven 
that he is among those who definitely contributed to the 
development of Israel's religion,^ but, as we can see in Plutarch, 
his ideas spread far in the ancient world ; and to this day his 
own faith lives and remains of interest to those who care to 
1 J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 321. 



PERSIA 199 

know what the human mind can do in seeking after God. 
Mani (a.d. 215/6-273/6) and his reHgion are another manifesta- 
tion of Persian interest in religious thought, and St. Augustine 
is a witness to the wide influence of a thinker who tried to 
reconcile Christ and Zoroaster. Islam itself suffered change 
when it reached Persia;^ and the nineteenth century saw 
once more in Bdbiism and Bahaiism the vitality of the Persian 
mind. So far as history is yet unfolded, no other Eastern 
people, apart from the Jews, has meant so much to the West 
or has taken so large a part in shaping the civilization and 
the thought of mankind. 

When the Persians first appear as newcomers in the 
West, we recognize in them a sound and healthy primitive 
people. They have won ascendancy over the Medes ; and 
Croesus, King of Lydia, so Herodotus tells us, is preparing to 
attack them. To him comes the wise Sandanis. " O King," 
said Sandanis, " thou makest ready to take the field against 
men of this sort ; men who wear trowsers of leather, and the 
rest of their clothing is of leather ; and they eat, not what they 
would, but what they have, for their land is rough. More- 
over, they use not wine, but drink water ; they have no figs to 
eat, nor anything else that is good." ^ They are a people from 
a harbourless land of mountain and desert, but (in spite of 
Sandanis) not without fertile areas, which in time they turned 
to good account. Pliny gives us lists of their trees and fruits,^ 
and the peach to this day, in spite of the vagaries of European 
spellings, carries its origin in its very name — the " Persian " 
fruit. For, mountaineers as they were, the Persians loved 
gardens — kings and satraps in later days vied with one 
another in the beauty of their gardens and their " paradises." * 
The height and build of the Persians, men and women^ im- 
pressed the Greeks. " Their names," says Herodotus, '* are 
like their bodily shape and their magnificence ; " and Xeno- 

^ See E. G. Browne, A Year amongst the Persians, ch. vi. ; R. A. Nichol- 
son, Mystics of Islam, p. 8, urges that Sufism is not essentially Persian. 
See also T. W. Arnold, Preaching of Islam 2, p. 21 1. 

^Herodotus, i. 71. 

* Pliny, N.H. xii. 3 ; xv. 13, 14 ; 22 ; xix. 3, etc. Cf. G. Rawlin- 
son, Ancient Monarchies^, vol. iii. 139. 

* See notes of How and Wells on Herodotus, vii. 5 ; and evidence 
there cited. 



20O FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

phon tells his fellow-soldiers that he fears, if they consort 
with " the tall and beautiful women and maidens of the Medes 
and Persians/' they may, like the lotus-eaters, forget the 
homeward journey.^ That the Persian troops were among 
the world's best fighting men was evident from the victories 
of Cyrus and Darius ; at Plataea itself in 479 B.C., so far as 
"spirit and valour " went, they were not inferior to the Spartans ; 
and it would seem that to the end, though badly armed, 
badly organized, and badly led, the Persian soldier showed 
no degeneracy in personal courage.^ The Greeks remarked 
the decency and the courtesy of their manners,^ and Alexander 
the Great found among them a tone, a charm, and a dignity 
which neither Greek nor Macedonian possessed. There is apt 
to be in monarchical and episcopal societies a habit of manners 
which a republic does not always produce, and to emperors 
and people of position it is very attractive, especially when 
enhanced by contrast. 

" They teach their boys," says Herodotus,* " from five 
years old to twenty, three things only — to ride the horse, to 
shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth." The epigram 
is not to be forced ; writing and reading as part of Persian 
education are implied already by the inscriptions of Cyrus, 
and still more by those of Darius. Darius, indeed, it has been 
remarked, in his most famous inscription at Behistun lays 
great emphasis on truth and falsehood. " Lying they reckon 
the greatest of shame." ^ Riding may not have been — and 
probably was not — an accomplishment of the race in their 
mountain days, and Xenophon attributes the development of 

1 Herodotus, i. 1 39 ; Xen. Anah. iii. 2, 25. Cf. How and Wells on the 
story of Phye, Herodotus, i. 60 : -' This passage is very significant for 
Greek stature : this ' daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely 
fair,' was only about 5 feet 10 inches." The Persian names fascinated 
Aeschylus; cf. Persae, 21, 302, 959, -for lists of them. A similar turn 
of mind is seen in the geographical references of his Prometheus. 

2 Maspero, Passing of the Empires, p. 806. 

^ See the curious data of Herodotus, i. 133, 134 ; Xen. Cyrop. i. 2, 16 ; 
V. 2, 17 ; viii. i, 42. The passages rather suggest the Greek want of 
dignity which the Romans noticed. The Persian habit of kissing 
one's friends on lips (Herodotus, i. 134 ; Xen. Ages. 5,4; Cyrop. i. 4, 27). 

* Herodotus, i. 136. 

5 Herodotus, i. 138 ; note also his addition, " and debt next to it," 
and the reason given that a debtor is bound to lie a little. 



PERSIA 201 

cavalry to the reasoned judgment of Cyrus the Great.^ The 
description which he gives of that great conqueror's boyhood 
is perhaps more the ideal of the historian than an actual tran- 
script from Persian life ; but in any case it contains features 
which we know to be historical, and it is certainly the most 
delightful picture of boyhood in the classics. It may be 
noted that Xenophon emphasizes the Persian practice of 
educating boys of noble birth *' at the gates of the king " ^ or 
of the satrap, and of training them in " justice " ; and he 
describes a discipline which was not unlike the Spartan, but 
with perhaps a good deal more hunting and more emphasis on 
truth. 

Persian religion clearly interested Herodotus, but as he 
did not speak the language, there remain in his account of it 
some gaps and some confusions.^ Xenophon seems to have 
taken little interest in learning what the Persian religion 
really was. He represents Cyrus as uniformly religious, but 
in rather a Greek way — his Cyrus is pious as he himself is. 
Probably, like most Greeks and Romans, he assumed that the 
religion of other races would be essentially like his own, but 
with different names. From the sacred books of the old 
Persians we can supplement and correct what the Greeks 
tell us. 4 It results that Zoroaster was a real and historical 
man and a prophet, who died by violence towards the age 
of eighty, about 583 B.C. ; and the spread of his teaching 
from Bactria (Balkh), where he made his first great convert 
in King Vishtashpa (Hystaspes), can be traced over Persia. 
Strabo in a later day reveals its dissemination outside Persia, 
but the modern Parsis are emigrants who went to India to 
escape Muslim persecution, not a survival of a converted 
Indian community. In the popular mind Zoroastrianism is 
connected with the conflict of Ormuzd (Ahuramazda) and 

* Cyrop. iv. 3, 8 ; and he adds that to this day no Persian of rank 
will be seen on foot, § 23. Against this may be set the fact that Cyrus 
was sculptured on foot, and the Kings were represented on the darics 
kneeling to draw the bow. 

2 Xen. Anab. i. 9, 3. » Herodotus, i. 131 ; iii. 16. 

* See A. V. Williams Jackson, Zoroaster the Prophet of Ancient Iran, 
a book accepted by the learned in Persian ; J. H. Moulton's Early 
Zoroastrianism ; and E. G. Browne, Literary History of Persia (p. 30) > 
and A Year amongst the Persians, ch. xiii., xiv. 



202 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Ahriman, with the Magians, with strange customs in marriage 
and the disposal of the dead. That there is confusion here, 
and has been from the days of Herodotus, is clear. What 
appears to be the case is that the Magians were really not 
Persian at all, but an aboriginal tribe of earlier inhabitants 
lingering in the land and slowly imposing their religion and 
its customs upon the Persians themselves.^ Zoroaster was 
an Iranian, and in many striking points his faith and the 
practices and superstitions of the Magians were in conflict. 
Zoroaster knows no magic, 2 no astrology,^ no images,* and— 
unless in a very modified sense of the word — no temples. 
No religious buildings are found among the ruins of 
Pasargadae or Persepolis.^ The Magian left the dead to be 
torn by birds and dogs, a very primitive trait — and this 
usage was at last imposed on the Zoroastrian religion, as 
the Persian dakhmas and the Bombay '* towers of silence '* 
witness ; but the earlier Zoroastrian buried his dead, and 
the tombs of his kings stand to this day. " For all the 
profundity of Zarathushtra's thinking ... he was intensely 
alive to the practical realities of life ; and there was a singular 
absence of the mystical element in his teaching. A little 
more of it might perhaps have helped his religion to secure 
a much larger part in human history. A more conspicuous 
absence is that of asceticism, which cuts him off strikingly 
from spiritual kinship with India." ^ Tradition states that 
Zoroaster was thrice married, and had several sons and 
daughters, and that the three wives survived him ' — Herodotus, 
we may recall, remarked polygamy among the Persians and 
their pride in large families of sons. The marriage of very 
near relations seems Magian rather than Zoroastrian, and 
does not survive among the Parsis. 

^ See J. H. Moulton, Early Zovoastrianism, p. 193, and Essays and 
Studies presented to William Ridgeway, pp. 249-260. 

2 Moulton, ibid. p. 160. ^ Moulton, ibid. p. 237. 

* Moulton, ibid. p. 391. 

<* But Darius (at Behistun) speaks of restoring places of worship 
which the Magians had destroyed — i.e. altars on mountain heights 
(Justi, in Geiger und Kuhn, p. 427). 

* Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 146. 

7 WilHams Jackson, Zoroaster, p. 20 ; see also E. G. Browne, Lit. 
Hist. Persia, p. 161, on the contrast here with Mdnf. 



PERSIA 203 

At the centre of Zoroaster's religion stands the supremacy 
of Ahnramazda — '* a great god is Ahuramazda, who hath 
created this earth, who hath created that heaven, who hath 
created man, who created gladness of man '' ; so runs the 
inscription of Darius,^ and the Avesta speaks in the same 
style. " They count it unlawful," says Herodotus, ^ " to set 
up images and shrines and altars, and such as do they charge 
with folly, I think, because they do not hold the gods to be 
in the image of man, as do the Greeks. Their wont is to 
ascend to the tops of the mountains and do sacrifice to Zeus, 
calling the whole circle of the sky Zeus. They sacrifice also 
to the sun and the moon and earth and fire and water and 
winds. To these alone they sacrifice from of old, but they 
have learnt also to sacrifice to Ourania, having learnt it from 
the Assyrians and Arabs. The Assyrians call Aphrodite 
Mylitta, the Arabs Alilat,^ and the Persians Mitra.* The 
sacrifice of the Persians to the gods mentioned is this. They 
neither make altars nor light fire, when they would sacrifice. 
They use no libation, nor flute, nor garlands, nor meal;** 
and Herodotus goes on to describe the sacrifice of the ox, 
the prayer " for good for all the Persians and for the King,** 
and the presence of the Magian " chanting a theogony,** 
for " without a Magian it is not their custom to do 
sacrifice.** 

Herodotus shows already the foreign influences at work — 
he remarks, a little later, that of all men the Persians are 
most ready to accept foreign customs. One gathers that, as 
China to-day has three religions of very different origins more 
or less fused and supplementing one another, so the Persian 
in time found little difficulty in accommodating the faith of 
Zoroaster with the practices of the Magians and the unclean 
goddesses of the Semites. Cyrus was perhaps not a Zoroastrian 
at all ; his Elamite ancestors had probably long worshipped 

1 At Persepolis ; and similarly at Ganj Namah near Hamadan 
(Williams Jackson, Persia, Past and Present, p. 172). 
^ Herodotus, i. 1 3 1 f . 

* The Al-Ldt of Muhammad's heathen opponents. 

* That Mithras was not a feminine god was long ago noted. Moulton, 
Early Zoroastrianism, pp. 238, 400, discusses the blunder and its origin, 
connecting it with the pairing of Mithras and Anahita, and calling it a 
" helpful mistake." 



204 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Babylonian gods.^ Darius, however, is thought to have been 
definitely and decisively Zoroastrian — *' a man for whom 
religion was obviously a very real experience" ^ — he mentions 
no other gods beside Ahuramazda in his inscriptions. In 
Egypt, as king he repaired certain temples, but the one that 
he built at the oasis of Kharga he dedicated to Amen-Ra, 
the god of the luckless monotheist Amen-hotep IV. A 
hymn of fifty lines, placed in the mouth of the eight great 
primeval gods — and a very remarkable hymn — proclaims the 
greatness of Amen-Ra ; '* no god begot him, what god is 
like unto him ? '* It is suggested that Darius found so many 
attributes shared by Amen-Ra and Ahuramazda that he felt 
the hymn would honour both, if they were two and not one.^ 
Xerxes, and his queen Amestris, fell into ways abhorrent to 
Zoroaster,* though he repeats in a formal inscription the 
phrases of his father about Ahuramazda.* Artaxerxes II 
lapsed further and set up images of Anahita, and used her 
name in his inscriptions — '* By the grace of Ahuramazda, 
Anahita, and Mithra, I built this palace. May Ahuramazda, 
Anahita, and Mithra protect me ! " « 

It is interesting to find that the greatest of the Achae- 
menians — greatest in outlook, genius, and achievement — ^was 
so definitely monotheistic, while his successors, sons of the 
harem in every sense, declined to idolatry. What the common 
people and the nobles did, all the time, we can only guess. It 
was in all probability from them that Herodotus gained his 
knowledge, and if it is confused, here at least his informants 
were probably no less confused.' The last broken sentence of 

1 On this point Professor E. G. Browne writes to me : "I don't think 
it has been satisfactorily proved that the Achaemenians were Zoro- 
astrians. The fact that they called God Ahura Mazda proves nothing ; 
the pagan Arabs recognized Allah Tadld (God Most High), but this 
did not make them Muhammadans." 

* J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroasf nanism, p. 44. 

3 See E. A. Wallis Budge, History of Egypt, vol. vii. pp. 66-69. 

* J.'H.'M.oulton, Early Zoroastrianism, pp. 57, 129; Herodotus, vii. 114. 
^ Curzon, Persia, ii. 156. See later, p. 228. 

« Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 77. Berosus, ap. Clem. Alex. 
Profr. 5, 65, an interesting section on Persian religion. The inscription 
is at Susa. 

' They bore names, many of which pointed to the old gods (Meyer; 
Cesch. iii. §78). 



PERSIA 205 

Thucydides tells how Tissaphernes went to Ephesus and 
sacrificed to Artemis. 

Of the influence of foreign nations on a people so brilliant 
and lively of mind as the Persians we need little evidence. 
Herodotus attests it in their practice, chiefly noting the evil 
they learnt from their neighbours. ^ He also speaks of their 
adoption of the Median dress in peace and the Egyptian corslet 
in war. 2 Modern archaeologists remark the influence successively 
of Assyria, Lycia, Egypt, and Greece in their art and archi- 
tecture. ^ The result was a hybrid style, which lasted till the 
Achaemenian dynasty fell and then disappeared. 

The founder of the Persian Empire was Cyrus. Xenophon 
emphasizes the greatness of the man ; he details the races 
he ruled, peoples of many languages, the vast expanse of his 
kingdom (so vast that it would tax a man's endurance merely 
to travel over it from the palace that was its centre), the 
terror of Cyrus' name that went with the charm of it, and the 
reliance on his wisdom ; and he insists that such a man deserves 
study.* He was the founder ; and to the end part of the 
ritual of the Persian king's installation was the donning of 
the robe of Cjnrus.^ The ruins of his city still stand at Pasar- 
gadai — a city never finished. ^ His tomb is there, a rectangular 
roofed chamber of white stone, of extraordinary solidity, on 
a square platform approached by steep and lofty steps.' 
Alexander the Great visited it and was angry that his generals 
should plunder it, and he repaired the injuries they had done.^ 
Not very far away stands a monument, a pillar, with a 
sculptured figure. The features show a man of Iranian origin, 
with a face of a European type, the head bald or shaven on 
top, the hair short and matted, and the beard slightly curled. 

1 Herodotus, i. 133. 

2 Herodotus, i. 135. For the Median dress, cf. Xen. Cyrop. i. 3, 2 ; 
viii. I, 40; 3, I ; 8, 8. 

'Curzon, Persia, ii. pp. 189-193; Babelon, Manual, pp. 148, 149, 

150. 157. 

* Xen. Cyrop. i. i, 5. ^ Plut. Artax. 3. 

* Williams Jackson, Persia, ch. xix. 

' E. G. Browne, Year, 241 ; Curzon, Persia, ii. 75 ff. ; Babelon, 
Manual, p. 160. It is called to-day -- the Mosque of the Mother of 
Solomon." Justi (in Geiger und Kuhn), p. 421, on its Asiatic-Greek 
style, as found in Lycia. 

* Arrian, Anab. v. 29, 4-1 1 ; Strabo, 730. 



2o6 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

But the ornament is all foreign — over his head is a triple disk 
as over an Egyptian god ; he has wings like the genii of Assyria 
or Chaldaea, with well-marked feathers ; his robe has an 
Assyrian fringe ; in his hand is a statuette in Egyptian style. 
A short Persian inscription states : "I am Cyrus the King, 
the Achaemenian/* ^ 

But for our purposes Darius is of more importance. If 
C5n:us was the conqueror, it was Darius who organized the 
Empire, who made it formidable and significant, and gave it 
such stability as it kept for nearly two hundred years. It is 
agreed among students of antiquity that his extraordinary 
enlightenment, his moderation, his practical wisdom, and the 
width of his interests distinguish him among the conquerors 
and rulers of the East. At Behistun, on the side of a rugged 
crag, " of Gibraltar-like impressiveness," ^ at a height of 
three hundred feet above the plain, there is still to be read the 
inscription, in which, in about four hundred lines of old Persian 
in a beautiful cuneiform, Darius records how he won his throne 
and recaptured his Empire, " all by grace of Ahuramazda/' 
and he mentions the provinces name by name. 

" Saith Darius the King : When Ahuramazda saw this 
earth . . . then did He entrust it to me. He made me King, 
I am King, by the grace of Ahuramazda have I set it in right 
order, what I commanded them that was carried out, as was 
my will. If thou thinkest, ' How many were the lands which 
King Darius ruled ? * then behold this picture ; they bear 
my throne, thereby thou mayst know them. Then shalt thou 
know that the spears of the men of Persia reach afar ; then 
shalt thou know that the Persian waged war far from Persia. 

" Saith Darius the King : What I have done, that did I 
all by the grace of Ahuramazda : Ahuramazda vouchsafed me 
help till I completed the work. May Ahuramazda protect 
me from . . .and my House and these lands ! For this 
do I pray Ahuramazda : may Ahuramazda vouchsafe me 
this! 

^Babelon; Manual, p. i6o ; A. V. Williams Jackson, Persia, Past 
and Present, p. 281. 

2 A. V. Williams Jackson, Persia, Past and Present, pp. 177-187. 
Englishmen may feel a legitimate pride in the fact that Sir Henry 
Rawlinson first gave this inscription to the world. 



PERSIA 207 

" O man ! This is Ahuramazda*s command to thee : 
Think no evil ; abandon not the right path ; sin not/' 1 

PersepoHs, forty miles south of Pasargadae and forty 
north of Shiraz, is the new capital that Darius founded and 
Xerxes finished. Five miles away from the Takht-i-Jamshid 
and its palaces, cut into the face of a long high bluff, is the 
grave of Darius. The carving on the rock represents the 
facade of an Achaemenian palace. It is identified by two 
trilingual inscriptions of sixty lines. Beside it m the cliff's 
face are the graves of Xerxes and two others of the Kmgs, 
and a little to one side below it is a later monument, well 
placed— a finely-rendered bas-relief representing the surrender 
of the Roman Emperor Valerian to Shapur, the Sasanian king, 
in A D. 260, the proudest achievement of that dynasty.^ It 
remains for us to see what this king did—" Darius the great 
King, the King of kings. King of lands peopled by all races, 
for long King of this great earth, the son of Vishtdsp, the 
Achaemenian, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan 

descent. 

The problem before Darius was a difficult one. He had seen 
the Empire fall to pieces in the troublous time of Gaumata the 
Magian who lied to the people and said, '' I am Bardiya the 
son of Cyrus." Darius had overthrown the usurper and he 
had reconquered the lost provinces ; but was it possible to 
keep them, to knit them together, and to secure his House 
against the disruption of the Empire whenever a new King 
ascended the throne— the common fate of Oriental monarchies ? 
The Empire reached far, and it included civiHzed nations Hke 
the Egyptians and the Asiatic Greeks and savages like the 
Mossynoeci; it even touched India. Customs, languages, 
religions, governments of every kind it comprised— a bewilder- 
ing and confused congeries of all sorts of races in every stage 
of culture. 3 What could be done to unite it ? Its variety 
was, it is true, in one way a source of strength to the Persian 

1 E. G. Browne, Lit Hist, of Persia, p. 94. 

a A. V. Williams Jackson, Persia, 296-305 ; Curzon, Persia, ii. 120; 
E. G. Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia, p. 151. 

» Asia Minor seems even then to have been what it is to-day— the 
home of races, broken to fragments, and the fragments mixed, the 
races too distinct and too involved either to coalesce or to separate. 



2o8 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

rulers, for peoples so alien to each other might be trusted never 
to make common cause against the throne with any real 
prospect of success ; the distances were too great,^ and the 
differences too vital. ^ But there was weakness in the variety, 
for the Persian nation stood alone among its subjects, and 
however well it governed, it remained a foreign power to which 
there could be no loyalty. Egypt, for instance, was well 
governed under Darius; it had peace, and with peace, as 
always in Egypt, when taxation is not ruinous, prosperity ; 
but Egypt never liked the Persian. The Egyptian did not 
want good government by the foreigner ; and the repeated 
rebellions of Egypt go far to explain the ineffectiveness and 
the decline of Persian power. 

The great work of Darius was organization.^ The Empire 
was divided into satrapies, the number of which varied from 
time to time. Over each was a satrap, who with certain 
limitations had a place and a task like that of the King 
himself. Generally at first, and later on almost without 
exception, the satraps were Persians, and frequently men of 
families connected with the King's own.* Among the duties 
of the satrap, the levying of tribute and the forwarding of it 
to the King came first. Under Cyrus and Cambyses there 
had been no regular tribute ; now it was organized on a 
definite basis and the satrap was responsible. ^ Administration 
and justice were in the hands of the satrap, and by his side 
stood two independent officers of the crown, a royal secretary 
and a military commander ; under him there sometimes 
were subordinate governors (virapxot).^ At least, it was so 

iCf. 'Ken.Anab.i. 5, 9. 

2 Meyer, Gesch. iii. § 56, notes also that Assyrian conquerors and invad- 
ing tribes (Cimmerians and Scythians, cf. Herodotus, i. 6, 15, 105 ; Strabo, 
627) by wearing down the nations had made the Persian's task easier. 

3 Grundy, Great Persian War, p. 41. 

* See notes of How and Wells on Herodotus, iii. 89 f. Satraps and 
satrapies existed before Darius. 

* Note the demand of Darius II for the arrears of tribute of the 
Ionian cities as soon as the Athenian disaster at Syracuse was known. 
The demand was sent to the satraps. 

« The word satrap (khshatrapavan) made its way slowly in Greek 
literature. Herodotus says virapxos ; the satrapy he calls vo/iw, 
only twice using (TaTpairrjirj, and then explaining it by apxn' Aeschylus 
has neither term ; Thucydides aarpajreia, but not aarpdnris. Xeno- 



PERSIA 209 

in theory ; for in practice in a great empire with no telegraphs 
many things are done and have to be done which do not 
square with theory. It was designed that satrap and 
secretary and miUtary commander should be independent 
of one another, even a little hostile to one another, and all 
in consequence more loyal to the Great King and more 
dependent on him.^ A similar plan was adopted by Louis XIV 
in Canada, w^here governor, bishop, and intendant divided 
responsibility and reported upon one another to the King. 
But practically everything that a satrap was supposed not 
to do, satraps sooner or later did. Of course it may be that 
the Greeks over-systematized the arrangements of which they 
learned.2 Satraps did command armies, for they were 
charged to suppress rebellions, and now and then had to deal 
with rebels without waiting for orders, and they had at times 
the responsibility of making war on their own account with 
neighbouring tribes or states. ^ They also coined money, 
which was normally a royal prerogative ; but when a satrap 
was in charge of an army on military service, he coined the 
money to pay it, and the coinages of some of them are 
well known — e.g. Tissaphemes, Pharnabazos, and Datames.* 
Whether strict or easy, the general scheme was for a long 
while effective — as effective as most plans of government ; 
for the management of the great expeditions against Greece 
in the reigns of Darius and Xerxes implies energy and skill 

phon is the first to use o-aTpaTrrjs (as he was to use rayos in prose), and 
he distinguishes virapxos as an official of lower rank (of. Anab. iii. 
5, 17, and iv. 4, 4). The Greeks were not all sure of the spelling of 
the word — e^aiOpdTrrjs and ^aidpaTrcvrnv are variants. See Hicks and 
Hill, Greek Inscv., No. 133. 

1 Grundy, Persian War, 41. 

2 Xenophon, for instance; see Cyvop. viii. 6, 1-4; Econ. 4, 9. 
The same is said of Herodotus. Foreigners generalize and systematize 
what they hear, for they are very rarely in possession of the excep- 
tions that natives know. Tourist knowledge of the colonies illustrates 
what I mean. 

^ Cf. expedition against Naxos, Herodotus, v. 32 ; and Herodotus, 
v. 96, Artaphrenes and Athens. 

* See Babelon, Les Perses Achemenides, p. xxi f . We often hear 
of the King supplying the money for a war ; some wars, however, 
must have been financed by the satraps at their own cost or at the cost 
of the satrapies. 
14 



210 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and organization. The expeditions, it is true, failed, but 
storms at sea and the personal folly of Xerxes explain a 
great deal. Yet immense armies were mobilized, and trans- 
ported, and fed,^ and brought into action, vast distances 
away from their homelands ; and great fleets held the sea 
and co-operated with the armies. Even in the decline of 
Persia, when the driving power is supplied, as by Pharnabazos 
and Conon, the machinery is all there, and a great fleet can 
take the sea and win a triumphant and decisive victory. 

So far as we know, the satraps were paid no regular 
stipend, but it is possible and likely that in organizing the 
tribute and its collection they charged their upkeep upon 
their satrapies. Eastern and western governors have grown 
rich without salaries in every age. Some satrapies seem to 
have been practically hereditary. Of these the most interest- 
ing is that of Daskyleion on the Propontis. Here, as a reward 
for his services to Xerxes in the great campaign that was 
wrecked at Salamis, Artabazos the son of Pharnaces was 
established ; ^ and he was succeeded by his son and grandson, 
Pharnabazos and Pharnaces. ^ Of these two men we know 
little, but we may owe them a good deal more than we suspect ; 
for it generally held that the family of Daskyleion were among 
the Persian friends of Herodotus, who was certainly remark- 
ably well informed about their founder. Pharnaces was 
succeeded by his son Pharnabazos, who plays a large part 
in Greek history — an attractive figure in the pages of 
Thucydides and especially of Xenophon. Xenophon yields 
to natural affinity and delays his narrative to speak of the 
beauties of the satrap's estate, his hunting-grounds and his 
paradises, the river, the birds, the villages, the abundance ; * 
and then he tells in his vivid and pleasant way of the dis- 
cussion between the great Persian noble and the Spartan 
king — ^how Pharnabazos reminded him what a friend he had 
been to Sparta through the last years of the Peloponnesian 

1 We have certain slight hints of commissariat plans — e.g. Herodotus, 
vii. 23, 25 ; Xen. Anah. i. 5, 6, the -' Lydian market " with Cyrus' 
troops ; cf. Cyrop. vi. 2, 38, 39. 

2Thuc. i. 129. 

3 Thuc. ii. 67 ; v. i ; satrap, 430-414 B.C. He befriended the 
Delians expelled from their island by the Athenians. 

* Xen. Hellmica, iv. i, 15 if. 



PERSIA 211 

War, and how he had built them fleets ; and now they have 
ravaged his country, " and the beautiful buildings and the 
paradises full of trees and wild animals that my father left 
me, which I enjoyed so much, all these I see cut down and 
burnt down." Agesilaos pled war, and with necessity (the 
t3rrant's plea) excused his devilish deeds ; but why, he 
suggested, should not Phamabazos revolt from the King ? 
Pharnabazos replies that he would, if the King made him 
subject to another ; but if not, " know assuredly, I will fight 
against you to the best of my power." So king and satrap 
shake hands and part friends. 

With such a tenure, and with troops of their own, particu- 
larly cavalry, it was hard for the King himself to be rid of his 
satraps ; and Herodotus tells a story which illustrates how care- 
fully the operation had to be undertaken, even by so strong a 
King as Darius. ^ But satraps were not left quite to them- 
selves. There were " King's Eyes " and '' King's Ears," whose 
functions are suggested by their names, and who were con- 
stantly keeping the King in touch with what went on in his 
Empire. 2 Whether he used this information depended on 
himself, and, in some reigns, on the harem. Aristophanes, in 
his Acharnians, represents a certain Shamartabas, the '' King's 
Eye," as coming on an embassy to Athens ; Dikaiopolis wishes 
the crow would pick out the *' King's Eye," and in the end it 
turns out that Shamartabas is as sham as his name. The title 
of the office evidently interested the Greeks, but it is not clear 
that such an official would be sent on an embassy, nor whether 
the King had more than one * ' Eye " at a time. ^ That the King 
and his ** Eye " between them insisted on honest justice so far 
as they could, is to be seen in the story of the judge whom 
Cambyses deposed, and whose skin covered the cushion on 
which his son and successor sat to administer the law.* The 

* Herodotus, iii. 126-128 ; Oroites the satrap had a bodyguard of 
1000 Persians. 

2 Xen. Cyrop. viii. 2, 10 ; 6, 16. How and Wells on Herodotus, i. 1 14, 
suggest that these officers did not travel as much as the Greeks thought. 
Grundy, Persian War, p. 43, accepts Xenophon's statqjnent. 

3 The -* King's Eye " ; cf. Herodotus, i. 114 ; iii. 126 ; Plut. Artax. 
12 ; Aristophanes, Ach. 92 ; and the earliest reference (Aesch. Pers. 980) 
seems to imply a single -* Eye " in attendance on the King. 

* Herodotus, v. 25. 



212 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Empire was after all a despotism, and, as the Royal Judges 
told Cambyses, there was a law that the King could do what 
he pleased ; ^ and he did. The King's vengeance on traitors, 
real or imaginary, could be terrible, from the days of Darius to 
the end. 2 To secure the King the quickest news and the 
swiftest execution of his orders, the Persian posts were devised — 
the quickest thing on earth, Herodotus says, and adds a qualifi- 
cation, " of mortal things." So also says Xenophon without 
the qualification. Marco Polo speaks in the same way of posts 
in the Chinese Empire at the time of his residence there (about 
1292). 3 

One feature of Oriental government has always been the 
steady accumulation of treasure by the ruler, and the Persian 
Kings were no exception. " The Persian," says Xenophon, 
" considered that, if he had endless money, he would have 
everything under his hand ; so all the gold there was among 
men, all the silver, all the most precious things, he tried to gather 
for himself." * Herodotus describes how all the tribute, 
which he computes to have amounted to 14,560 talents a year 
in the days of Darius, was melted down and kept in the form 
of ingots. 5 The expenses of the Court must have been large, 

1 Herodotus, iii. 31. ^ Cf . Herodotus, iii. 119. 

* Herodotus, viii. 98 ; Xen. Cyrop. viii. 6, 17, 18. Beazley, Dawn 
of Modern Geography, vol. iii. p. 98 : Polo says the Chinese post would 
cover 250 miles in a day and nearly as much in a night. From the 
reminiscences of an old friend, writing of Bristol about 1823, I take a 
sentence or two which may be of interest by way of illustration. 
-' About this period coach travelling had been brought to perfection. 
The fast coaches averaged ten miles an hour, exclusive of stoppages. 
It required, at least, 120 horses to work such a coach between Bristol 
and London . . . kept in first-rate condition, with an. unlimited supply 
of food — for the proprietors were well aware how much dearer horses 
were than hay and corn. . . . Though the horses were changed some 
thirteen or fourteen times, not more than half an hour was lost in these 
frequent stoppages. I have seen one team taken out and another put 
to, in less than a minute. The horses had seldom more than six hours* 
work in a week ; but at the pace they were driven, it was like fighting, 
and they required prolonged rest to recover from the excessive strain.'* 
He contrasts an advertisement of a London and Bristol coach of the 
eighteenth century — " the proprietors solemnly pledge themselves, with 
the blessing of Almighty God, to perform the journey in the short space 
of three days ** (F. Trestrail, College Life in Bristol, p. 1 1 1). 

* Xen, Ages. ^,6. ^ Herodotus, iii. 95 ; perhaps he quotes the total. 



PERSIA 213 

and the Persian King no doubt found that what the Spartan 

king says in Thucydides is true — as others have found since to 

their cost and their children's after them — that war is a matter 

of finance as much as of arms.^ Lysander took back to Sparta 

after the Peloponnesian War the sum of 470 talents, which 

Xenophon describes as the balance left of the tributes turned 

over to him by Cyrus. ^ Isocrates says the Persian King 

Darius II had contributed 5000 talents to Sparta in all.^ He 

also says that the war against Evagoras cost Artaxerxes II more 

than 15,000 talents,* which it well may have, as we gather in 

fact from other sources that the government of Artaxerxes 

had a certain genius for waste and inefficiency. ^ None the less 

the hoarding went on, and when Alexander took Susa, he 

captured there 50,000 talents, and another hoard at Persepolis.^ 

It was not altogether an idle brag of Aristagoras that, if Cleo- 

menestook Susa, he might challenge Zeus on the score of wealth.' 

George Finlay computed the treasure suddenly thrown into 

general circulation by Alexander's conquest at between seventy 

and eighty millions sterling.* The profound changes it must 

have made in the Greek world, in all international relations 

and in morals, in everything down to the cost of the simplest 

articles in the market of a country town, it is hard to grasp ; 

and no doubt a great deal of the treasure had never come West 

at all. Then the stream turned, and for centuries gold flowed 

eastward again, and one of the difficulties of the Roman 

Empire was the scarcity of the precious metals. 

Side by side with the satrapies, or in some cases within them, 
there survived many traces of older orders which Darius main- 
tained and utilized. Existing communities were in many cases 
preserved, and often they were allowed to govern themselves 
as they preferred, though their liberties were precarious and 
their cities unwalled. The reversal of the policy of setting up 
tyrants over the Asiatic Greeks is a case in point ; Mardonius 
put an end to the tyrants and substituted democracies.^ Per- 

1 Thuc. i. 83, 2. 2 Hellenica, ii. 3, 8-9. 

' Isocrates, de Pace, 97. * Isocrates, Evag. 60. 

^ e.g. Isocrates, Paneg. 142 ; and Diod. Sic. xv. 41. 

• Arrian, Anah. iii. 16, 7 ; Strabo, 727-730. 

' Herodotus, v. 49, 7. » Finlay, Greece under the Romans, ch. i. p. 1 2. 

• Herodotus, vi. 43. 



214 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

haps it was not really so strong an indication of the prevalence 
of democratic ideas among the Persians as Herodotus supposed, 
but it showed at least a sense and a liberality that the imperial 
states of Greece did not reach. In Egypt it was the other way. 
" If Psammenitos could have been trusted not to make trouble, 
he would have received Egypt again to govern it ; for the 
Persians are wont to honour the sons of kings ; and even if the 
kings revolt they none the less give back the government to their 
sons," says Herodotus,^ and he instances the sons of Inaros and 
AmjTrtaios, though no men ever did the Persians more mis- 
chief than these two. The Babylonians seem to have had the 
same usage, to judge from Nebuchadnezzar's treatment of the 
kingdom of Judah. Xerxes took with him on his expedition 
against Greece quite a number of subject or vassal princes ^ — 
the kings or tyrants (the latter name is rather loosely used) of 
Tyre and Sidon, of Cilicia and Lycia,^ several from Cyprus and 
Caria, and pre-eminent among the last Queen Artemisia. 
Xenophon explains that Cyrus " sent no Persians to be satraps 
of Cilicia and Cyprus and the Paphlagonians, because it ap- 
peared they campaigned with him of their own free will 
against Babylon ; but he appointed that these also should 
pay tribute." * Isocrates, not quite accurately, says no Persian 
was ever master of Lycia.^ 

It is difficult, sometimes very difficult, for a modern student 
to be quite sure exactly how dependent or independent these 
tributary kings and princes were from time to time ; perhaps 
it was no easier for themselves to be sure. A good deal 
depended on geography — how accessible the kingdoms were to 
fleets or armies, and how far available for the operations of 
cavalry ; a good deal on what we call personal equations — the 
characters of the prince or princess concerned, of his or her 
brothers and other relatives,^ of the neighbouring satrap, of the 

1 Herodotus, iii. 15. 

2 Of. Herodotus, vii. 98, 195 ; and also v. 104 ; viii. 11. 

* A brilliant emendation by E. Meyer may claim a note. The text 
reads Kvkios KvlSepvia-Kos 2LKa. But Kv^epvis is a Lycian name attested 
by an inscription, and Koo-aUas answers to the Lycian Cheziga. So 
Meyer divides the words accordingly. " This is the state of Keasars 
and of Kings ! " 

* Xen. Cyrop. viii. 6, 8 ; and vii. 4, 2. ^ Isocrates, Paneg. 161. 

* Cf. Strabo, c. 656, Pixodaros and Ada. 



PERSIA 215 

reigning Great King. But it is easy to see that if a native 
king could be trusted at all, he might be a much more congenial 
ruler for his subjects than a Persian satrap would be ; and it is 
just possible that the consciousness of a higher power beyond 
might be a check upon oppression, as is the case in India to-day, 
though no instance seems to be recorded of the deposition 
of a king by the Persians on any such ground. In any case, 
some of the countries or regions mentioned had native dynasties 
throughout. In Cilicia, for instance, native kings are known to 
have reigned from before the Persian conquest down to the fall 
of the Empire. 1 Seven of them are known to us by name, 
perhaps eight, the most famous being the third Syennesis, who 
fell gloriously at Salamis, and the fourth Syennesis, who with 
the aid of his wife and son trimmed very dexterously between 
Cyrus and Artaxerxes. Artemisia of Caria and Halicarnassus 
we have met before. Whether the later Artemisia who built 
the Mausoleum to commemorate her husband, and the Ada 
who adopted Alexander the Great as her son,^ are of the same 
family as the great queen whom Xerxes so much admired, 
I do not know. 

Beside the satraps and the native princes, there were here 
and there throughout the Empire noble families established 
upon estates given them by the Kings. Cyrus, Xenophon 
tells us, devised the plan, and " to this day in one land and 
another the descendants of those who then received them 
enjoy the property, though they live themselves at the King's 
court." ^ Sometimes a city with its tribute was assigned to 
a man and his descendants, or a group of villages to a queen.* 
The most interesting grants of this kind, of which we have 
records, were those made to Greek refugees or exiles. In 
491 B.C. the Spartans deposed their King Demaratos, and he 
took refuge with King Darius, who " received him with great 
honour and gave him land and cities." ^ Xerxes took him 
with him on the march to Greece, and Herodotus tells of the 
acute advice which the exile gave the King from time to 

^ See list in Babelon, Les Perses Achimenides, p. xxiv ; Syennesis III 
in Aesch. Pers. 327, and Herodotus, vii. 98 ; Syennesis IV, Xen. Anab. 
i. 2, and Diod. Sic. xiv. 20. 

2 Arrian, Anab. i. 23, y-S ; Strabo, c. 656. 

3 Cyrop. viii. 6, 5. * Xen. Anab. ii. 4, 27. ^ Herodotus, vi. 70. 



2i6 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

time, and how the King himself defended him from Persian 
criticism.^ No doubt, if the expedition had succeeded, De- 
maratos would have been vassal king of Sparta. Eighty 
years later the descendants of Demaratos meet us, bearing the 
famous old Spartan names of Eurysthenes and Procles, and 
still lords of Pergamon, Teuthrania, and Halisarna. Procles 
*' went up '.' with Cyrus, and ranked among his Persian com- 
manders. When the Ten Thousand started on their weary 
journey over the mountains, Procles managed to get back to 
his principality an easier way — and perhaps made his peace, 
as others did, with Artaxerxes. He was able to befriend 
Xenophon and the mercenaries on their reappearance in his 
country, and lent aid to the Spartan commander Thibron 
against Tissaphernes — which, as we shall see, in a loose-hung 
empire was not fighting against his sovereign.^ Here again, 
as in the Daskyleion family, the fullness and interest of Herodotus* 
information implies some friendship between the historian and 
the intervening generation or generations of the exiled king's 
house. Xenophon was clearly interested in Procles, who saved 
his life and entertained him. In the same region and at the 
same time Xenophon had the friendliest relations with another 
Greek family of well-established exiles — the descendants of 
Gongylos of Eretria, a less honourable ancestor than Demaratos.^ 
It is perhaps worthy of remark that the towns of Gongylos 
and his family were included in the Athenian Empire in its 
great days, and, when it fell, reverted to the exiles, as the 
Ionian cities did to the satrap. Whether the Gongylids 
required the tribute they had lost during Athenian supremacy 
to be made good, there is no guessing. The most curious 
instance of a grant of revenue of this kind was that made to 
Themistocles in exile, for Plutarch had among his fellow- 
students at Athens another Themistocles, a descendant of the 
great one, who was still after five hundred years in the en- 
joyment of the honours granted to his ancestor at Magnesia.* 

^ Herodotus, vii. 3, loi, 209, 235, 237 ; also viii. 65. 

2 Procles : Xen. Anab. ii. i, 3 ; ii. 2, i ; vii. 8, 17 ; Hellenica, iii. i, 6. 

^ Anab, vii. 8 ; Hellenica, iii. i, 6 ; they held Myrina, Gryneion, and 
one or two more towns. 

* Plut. Them. 32 ; of. Thuc. i. 138, 5. Probably the later Themis- 
tocles drew less than the fifty talents a year that the earlier one had 
from Magnesia, 



PERSIA 217 

The Persian Empire was not pre-eminently a military 
monarchy, though conquest was its base, and too often re- 
conquest was required of it. Its actual military forces were 
not for the size of the realm large. The vast masses of men, 
marched against Greece by Xerxes, were composed of national 
levies raised for the purpose, with every variety of arm and 
accoutrement, as Herodotus describes them.^ The real core of 
all was the Persian army,^ composed chiefly of archers and 
cavalry. The dress and weapons of the Persian archer are 
described by Herodotus, and what he says is confirmed by 
Persian monuments, notably b}/ the Dieulafoy archer-frieze 
at Susa.^ The tiara, or soft cap, the embroidered shirts with 
sleeves, the trousers — especially the trousers — are again and 
again noticed. The archer carried a light wooden or wicker 
shield (yeppov), a short spear,* a stout bow, some thirty 
arrows in his quiver, and a short knife or dagger in his girdle 
on the right side. He wore no armour. For his long marches 
and his archery armour would have been useless. There were, 
however, men in armour in Xerxes' troops,^ and Xenophon 
speaks of armoured horses ^ — the familiar cataphracts of the 
wars of Roman and Sasanian. Herodotus represents Arista- 
goras as speaking with confidence at Sparta and again at 
Athens of the ease with which the light- armed troops of the 
Persian King could be defeated.' He may have spoken so, 
and later days realized that in hand-to-hand fighting the Persian 
archer, for all his spirit and courage, was no match for the 
man in armour ; ® but the Greeks generally were afraid of the 
Persian army till after Plataea. At Plataea the value of the 
Persian cavalry was felt,^ as it was later on in the retreat of 
the Ten Thousand ^^ and in the campaign of Agesilaos.^^ 

1 Herodotus, vii. 61-80. 

^ Herodotus, ix. 68, Trdvra to. irprjyixara rcov ^ap^dpcov ^prrjTO €k Uepo-ecou. 

* See article on Persian Arms by A. V. Williams Jackson in Studies 
in Honour of Henry Drisler. 

* Rawlinson, Anc. Mon.*, iii. p. 175, says about 6 or 7 ft. long. The 
Macedonian sarissa was 20 ft. long. 

* Herodotus, viii. 113 ; ix. 22. • Cyrop. vi. 4, i. 

' Herodotus, v. 49, 97. ® Herodotus, ix. 6^, 

» Herodotus, ix. 49, etc. 

^o Anab. ii. 2, 7 ; 4, 6 ; 6, 5 ; iii. i, 18 ; 3, 19-20 ; 4, 24. 
*^ Hellenica, iii. 4, 13-15 ; iv. i, 3. 



2i8 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

The two peoples took war in different ways. Mardonius, 
in the pages of Herodotus, — and probably other Persians in 
talk with the historian, — ^pointed out the folly of Greek war- 
fare : ^ " they find out the fairest and most level place and 
then go down into it and fight ; so that the conquerors come 
off with great disaster — and I need not speak of the beaten 
party ; they perish." They ought either to settle their dis- 
putes by negotiation, or do anything else rather than fight, 
but if they must fight " then find out where each is hardest to 
beat and try there." This was the Greek tradition, which had 
grown up in the wars of neighbouring cities, when the point 
of attack was always the cultivated land, " the fairest and most 
level," with its olives and its grain. In the Peloponnesian 
War and later the Greeks learnt the use of light-armed. Cavalry 
of any great value they never had. The wars of Western Asia 
— Cilicia and Armenia and such regions excepted — were fought 
on great plains, where mobility counted, and the horseman and 
the archer were indispensable. As a result war on land 
between Greek and Persian could hardly be effective, without 
bad blunders on one side or the other. The Anabasis shows 
this plainly. Nothing on the Persian side can match the 
Greek hoplites ; wherever hoplites can march in square forma- 
tion, the Ten Thousand can safely go. But where cavalry are 
concerned, the Ten Thousand are helpless, and take to the 
mountains with relief ; and there they fall among light-armed 
enemies, fight their way through with loss, and leave the moun- 
tains with relief as genuine. It was not till Alexander com- 
bined hoplite, light- armed, and cavalry that Persia really 
broke down ; and even then it is said that he owed his victories 
to the bad tactics of Darius. Proof of this is found in the 
Parthian victory of Carrhae, but there the major faults were 
on the Roman side. In the expedition of Xerxes the strength 
of Persia lay in the co-operation of army and fleet — an idea 
which the Spartans and other Peloponnesians refused to take 
in. It was Themistocles who recognized it, and to him above 
all the Greeks owed their victory and their national existence. 

One feature of Persian war must not be quite overlooked. 
The employment of the camel in war strikes the Western 
oddly, but it won Cyrus his battle against Croesus at Pterie, 
1 Herodotus, vii. 9, 2/3. Cf. Polybius, xiii. 3. 



PERSIA 219 

for " the horse is afraid of the camel and cannot bear either 
to see its shape or to smell it/' So said Herodotus. ^ '* Twice 
to-day," writes Mr. Hogarth, ^ "we have had to draw aside on 
the mountain paths to let long strings of swaying bearded 
camels jingle past. Strange how the horses hate these familiar 
acquaintances." I am told the same thing by a traveller in 
China ; there separate inns exist for those who bring the one 
animal or the other. The camels carried mounted archers.^ 
Xerxes had camels in the army he led against Greece — the 
first ever seen in Europe, and the lions attacked them in 
Thrace.* Agesilaos captured camels, after his cavalry battle 
near Sardis in 395, and marched them back to Greece.^ One 
would hardly have suspected the Spartan king of so amiable 
a trait as this interest in strange animals. ** No gentleman 
{koXcx; KCL^aOo^)," says Xenophon, *' would wish to breed 
camels to ride them, nor to practise to fight on camel-back" « — 
an interesting touch of Western conventionalism. 

The standing army of Persia seems never to have been 
very large at any one time or place. When a large army was 
required, it took time to organize and concentrate. In 
general, however, the Persian meant to have a peaceful Empire, 
and never too large a force under one satrap. Persia like 
Rome understood this. Garrisons v/ere kept in important 
citadels and fortresses all over the Empire, as in Sardis and 
Babylon, and several Egyptian centres.'' When it was a 
matter of building or mobilizing a fleet, Persia seems to have 
had great luck or great skill in managing it with a minimum 
of warning, but possibly her enemies knew more than his- 
torians have told us.^ 

Darius stands out among Oriental rulers for his sym- 
pathetic grasp of the significance of peaceful trade in the 
development of a country or an empire . He fought and crushed 

^ Herodotus, i. 80 ; cf. vii. 87 ; cf. Xen. Cyrop. vii. i, 27, 48, 49. 
2 A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, p. 46. 
' Xen. Cyrop, vi. 2, 8. 

* Herodotus, vii. ^6, 126 ; cf. Aristophanes, Birds, 276. 

^ Xen. Hellenica, ii. 4, 24. " Xen. Cyrop. vii. i, 49. 

' Cf. Xen. Cyrop. viii. 6, 3 ; Oecon. 4, 6. 

* Cf. Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, i, the arrival of the news of the Persian 
fleet building in 396. No doubt the Athenians knew about it already, 
as Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, i , seems to imply. 



220 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the rebels within and the disturbing tribes without, and he 
secured that the satraps should be strong enough to administer 
justice and maintain order, but not so strong as to be able to 
rebel. Trade began, with peace, to follow its natural con- 
nexions. In Asia Minor, for instance, the trade routes come 
down the three river valleys, through the mountain ranges that 
cut off the Aegaean shore and its cities on bays and headlands 
from the Asian hinterland.^ When Greece and Persia were 
at war these routes would be little travelled ; the ports 
without the trade that had made them could not thrive, 2 and 
the cities declined in importance, as is shown by the relatively 
small tribute they paid to Athens as compared with towns in 
Thrace. No doubt, when Pericles made his pacification with 
Persia in 449, he had trade in view.^ After the Peace of 
Antalkidas — betrayal of Greece, as the historians called it 
and as it really was * — prosperity came to the seaboard towns — 
to Ephesus, for instance, and Halicarnassus. Greek influence 
spread in Asia Minor ; merchants, adventurers, and artists ^ 
passed hither and thither, and above all mercenary soldiers.® 
This intercourse sent gold to Greece, and its value relative 
to silver dropped from thirteen to one down to twelve to 
one.' 

One of the curses of trade in the early Mediterranean world 
was brigandage, and the Persian dealt with it sternly. Of 
Cyrus the Younger as satrap, Xenophon tells us that no one 

1 See D. G. Hogarth, Ionia and the East, pp. 64, 65, on the routes, 
and p. 48, on the strength of the continental power behind the moun- 
tains. The shore cities cannot be independent or European, unless 
the Aegean is held by a strong maritime power. 

2 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth ^, p. 368. 

2 Cf. Thuc. ii. 69, Athenian oKKah^s from Asia and Phoenicia, and 
viii. 35, from Egypt ; and the Oligarch's Ath. Rep. 2, 7, trade in Cyprus, 
Egypt, and Lydia. 

* Cf. Polybius, vi. 49, 5 ; Plut. Avtax. 21. 

^ Their work survives in the monuments — e.g. Scopas, Leochares, 
Timotheos, and Bryaxis were engaged on the Mausoleum ; see Ernest 
Gardner, Handbook of Greek Sculpture, pp. 376, 393. 

® On this increasing intercourse, and its significance in preparing the 
way for the Hellenistic kingdoms, Judeich, Kleinas. Stud. pp. 5-7, 
15-17. 

' Cf. Beloch, Gr. Gesch. ii. pp. 342-343 ; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v, 
§888. 



PERSIA 221 

could say that he allowed evil-doers to laugh at him, but he 
punished them most unsparingly ; one could often see along 
the trodden highways men deprived of feet and hands and 
eyes ; so that in Cyrus' province it was possible for Greek or 
barbarian, if he did no wrong, to go where he would and take 
with him what might profit him.^ Mr. Williams Jackson tells 
us how he came on something of the same kind — the ferocious 
punishment of some criminal — and it was for the same crime, 
robbery on the high road. Iran hamin ast, he was told ; 
*' Persia is always the same." ^ 

Really good roads are apparently a Roman invention, but 
the great trunk roads of the Persian Empire, over which the 
King's posts travelled faster than anything else that was 
mortal, must have been kept in decent repair. This also con- 
tributed to the freedom and activity of commerce. ^ 

Another of Darius' great contributions to commerce was 
the canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. Sethos I (between 
1326 and 1300 B.C.) was the first to dig it, but it silted up. 
Necho (about 612 B.C.) began to repair it, but gave it up after 
it had cost 120,000 lives,* for an oracle said he was making 
it for barbarians. Darius dug it again. ^ Archaeologists have 
discovered the traces of it and five monuments of Darius along 
its course. It was fifty yards wide and sixteen to seventeen 
feet deep. The monuments had each of them inscriptions in 
Persian, Median, and Assyrian on the one side, and in Egyptian 
on the other : — " Darius the King saith : ' I am a Persian ; a 
Persian I govern Egypt. I commanded to cut this canal from 
the Nile, which is the name of the river that runs in Egypt down 
to the sea that is connected with Persia. Then the canal 
was cut here. I commanded this canal to be made, and said, 
Go from . . . this canal down to the shore of the sea . . . 
Such is my will.* " Darius also, it would appear, ordered the 

1 Xen. A nab. i. 9, 1 3. 

2 A. V. Williams Jackson, Persia, Past and Present, pp. 272-273. 
Cf . also the story of the 4000 mutilated Greek captives who met Alex- 
ander at Persepolis (Curtius, v. 5,6). 

3 Herodotus' description of the Royal Road, v. 52-54. 
* Very likely an exaggeration. 

** See Herodotus, ii. 158 ; and the notes of How and Wells ; Budge, 
Hist, of Egypt, vol. vi. 220 ; Flinders Petrie, Hist, of Egypt, vol. iii. 
366 ; Authority and Archcsology, p. 84. 



222 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

restoration of the schools ; ^ and in one way and another 
Egypt flourished under his rule. 

Geographical exploration seems to have been one of Darius' 
interests as it was one of Alexander's, and we have records of 
a number of voyages and expeditions made under his auspices. 
No one quite knows the object of his own Scythian expedition ; 
the gold mines, which one scholar supposes the King sought, 
are rather remote. Herodotus says that many parts of Asia 
were discovered by Darius and that he was responsible for the 
exploring voyage made by Skylax of Caryanda down the Indus 
about the year 509. Skylax, it may be noted, was a near 
neighbour of Herodotus. ^ It is likely that Herodotus owed 
his knowledge of India, limited as it is, to this and other ex- 
plorations made for the Persian. In Central Asia, too, Darius 
was in touch with the Scythians. Xerxes, we are told, sent a 
man to circumnavigate Africa, who sailed some way down the 
Atlantic coast, but preferred to come home and be put to 
death ^ — not for his failure but for a crime previously com- 
mitted, which a successful voyage was to have expiated. 

Another wise measure of Darius was the issue of a coinage 
of a standard weight and a very high purity. Herodotus says 
that the King refined his gold to the utmost point possible, 
and modern chemical analysis shows that the darics are of a 
gold with only 3 per cent of natural alloy,* The weight of 
the daric was normally 8 grammes 42 — a weight, one might 
say, traditional, for it was the Euboic standard, and that in its 
turn came from Babylon by way of Phocaea. It had the 
advantage too of being the equivalent of 20 drachmas.^ The 
King then takes as his base the most widely accepted standard 
in the world, and mints coins of pure gold. The design became 

^ Inscription of Uzahor-ent-res ; cf . How and Wells on Herodotus, 
vii. 7. 

2 Herodotus, iv. 44 ; Strabo, c. 100. If Alexander had read or re- 
membered this chapter, he would not have thought of identifying 
the Nile and the Indus, on the score of the crocodiles. His actual 
voyage down the Indus corrected the mistake (Arrian, vi. i). 

* Herodotus, iv. 43, voyage of Sataspes. 

* Babelon, Les Perses Achemenides, pp. iv-viii, on Persian darics ; 
G. F. Hill, Handbook of Greek and Latin Coins, pp. 13, 30. 

^ Xen. Anab. i. 7, 18: Cyrus promises a soothsayer 10 talents 
(=60,000 drachmas) and pays him 3000 darics. 



PERSIA 223 

familiar to all mankind — the Persian King with his cidaris 
erect on his head, kneeling and holding a bow. This remained 
practically unchanged from Darius I to Darius III. Every- 
body knew it and it was current everywhere — as the Attic 
drachma was and for the same reasons, the familiar look, the 
known weight, and the pure metal.^ When Agesilaos said he 
had been driven out of Asia by 30,000 archers, he did not 
need to explain his joke.^ 

We may perhaps add that Persian scholars hold that 
Darius reformed the calendar in a Zoroastrian direction, and 
established the solar year, with twelve months of thirty days, 
and five extra days, called the gdthds. In this connexion it 
is worth while to remember that a similar scientific reform 
of the year was one of Julius Caesar's first acts as dictator, 
and to contrast the difficulties involved by the short Muham- 
madan year of lunar months without intercalation.^ 

In all, it may be said, the contributions of Darius to trade 
and commerce are very striking. He understood and he 
acted. It may be urged that the hoarding of gold by the King 
withdrew it from circulation, and so far told against trade, 
but this does not outweigh the substantial benefits he 
conferred on all the trading communities of the eastern 
Mediterranean. 

One indication of the success of his work is the appearance 

1 Cf. liopoi, 3, 2. 2 piut. Avtax, 20. 

' See J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 48 ; and E. G. Browne, 
Lit. Hist, of Persia, p. 100. The Zoroastrian year is remarkable in 
ignoring the week. The twelve months are named after the twelve 
archangels, while the same twelve archangels plus eighteen other angels 
give each his name to one of the thirty days of the month. Muhammad 
found among the Arabs a system of intercalation which (as in Rome) 
was abused for the ends of faction. He forbade all intercalations in 
consequence. As the Moslem year (354 days) is less than a true solar 
year, Ramadan retrogrades through all the seasons in a period of about 
3 si years, to the great discomfort of those who have to fast through 
long summer days. All chronology is complicated in the most dreadful 
way by this use of a year which is not a year. See Lane, Modern 
Egyptians, ch. ix. The Babis revived the solar year in the form of 
19 months of 19 days { = 361 days) phis 5 days (or as many as were 
required). Nineteen is the numerical value of Wahid (the symbol 
One used for God), and 5 of Bah. The Bab aimed at basing all 
possible numeration on 19. Cf. Chapter I. p. 30. 



224 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

of a class of people, whom the Greeks called " two-tongued " ^ 
— interpreters and the like — perhaps predominantly Asiatic, 
for the Greek was rather noticeably a bad linguist. Herodotus 
spoke no Egyptian and no Persian, and Plutarch could make a 
schoolboy blunder with a Latin preposition (sine patris). It 
has indeed been suggested that in Aristophanes' day " Persian 
was as familiar to the Athenians as French was to Englishmen 
in the time of Queen Elizabeth,*' but the statement seems 
overbold.^ Negotiations, such as that of Callias at Susa in 
449, imply interpreters, and Athens had in 424 men capable 
of *' rewriting a dispatch out of the Assyrian letters " and 
understanding it.^ The most curious instance known to me 
of the bilingual is Pharnuches, a Lycian in Alexander's army, 
who could speak the language of the Asiatic Scythians and 
was very expert at it.* Such men are naturally only mentioned 
here and there, as occasion requires, but they represent a 
steady intermingling of races. 

In the period with which this book deals Persia is already 
in decline, and that decline we have now to consider. There 
can be little doubt it began with the disastrous issue of 
Xerxes' splendid expedition. The Persian had been unlucky 
in Europe — Darius among the Scythians, Mardonius in Thrace, 
Datis at Marathon — and things could not be left so. To 
abandon all claims of sovereignty over these rather insignificant 
European peoples — the uncivilized Scythians and the numeric- 
ally weak city states of the European Greeks— was to invite 
disorder in Asia,^ and above all in Egypt. Marathon had been 
the most signal failure, and before it could be avenged Egypt 
was in rebellion. ^ Three years passed before Egypt was 
reduced, and (says Herodotus) more enslaved than it had 
been under Darius. The Egyptologists tell us that there are 
no foundations of Xerxes or Artaxerxes I in Egypt. Then 
came the crowning shame and surprise of Xerxes' expedition, 

1 Thuc. viii. 85, Kapa biykaxraov. 

2 Starkie on Aristophanes, Ach. 100. The evidence he cites, viz. : 
the trick of Iphicrates (Polyaenus, iii. 9, 59), though the general employed 
men acquainted with Persian, rather implies that the public on whom 
the trick was played were shaky in the language. There is no evidence, 
I think, that Persian literature had any influence on Athenian. 

* Thuc. iv. 50. * Arrian, Anah. iv. 3, 7. 

5 Cf. Aesch. Pers. 586. • Herodotus, vii. i ; 7. 



PERSIA 225 

which everybody had expected to be in vincible. ^ It was 
followed by the rapid rise of the victorious Athenian con- 
federacy. One naval disaster came after another, and then 
in the middle of the century fresh trouble in Eg57pt (460-454) 
and rebellion in Cyprus. The meddlesome Athenians, how- 
ever, burnt their fingers in Egypt ^ — far more severely than we 
generally realize. Cimon the war-spirit fell, off Cyprus (449), 
and Pericles began to revert to the old view of Themistocles, 
that eternal war with the Persian was nonsense. Both he 
and King Artaxerxes were inclined for peace — the latter 
" conspicuous above Persian Kings for gentleness and high- 
mindedness," 3 or, in plainer language, inertia. CaUias went 
to Susa, then, in 449-448, and managed to negotiate, not 
exactly a peace, but an agreement, a pacification.* The King 
undertook not to send a fleet west of Phaselis, and the 
Athenians to leave his subjects alone — those in Egypt and 
Cyprus. The Asiatic Greeks were in the Athenian con- 
federacy, and were free of Persian rule. The Persian, how- 
ever, considered tribute as still due from them — autonomy 
and tribute the Persian thought not incompatible. ^ Autonomy 
is the most abused word of this period. The tribute to Persia 
was not paid by the Greeks of Asia ; but it was not forgotten, 
and the day came when it was claimed. 

This was when the power of Athens was broken in the 
harbour of Syracuse {413). The Spartans from the beginning 
of the Peloponnesian War had been sending ambassadors 
to Susa, but either they did not get through,* or they were 
"indistinct,"' or Persia did not believe that Sparta could 
do anj^hing against the Athenian naval power (judging very 
^*ightly), and was therefore indisposed to pick a needless and 
troublesome quarrel. Athens also sent embassies (if we may 
trust Aristophanes 8) who travelled with incredible comfort 

1 Herodotus, vii. 138 ; Diod. Sic. xii. i ; Meyer, Gesch. iii. §211. 

2 Thuc. i. 104-110. 3 piut. Artax. i. 

* The fact of the embassy, Herodotus, vii. 151 ; the bargain, Thuc. 
viii. 56 (an allusion) ; details (perhaps rather brightened) in Isocrates, 
Paneg. 118; Areop. 80, etc., and fourth-century orators; Diod. Sic. 
xii. 4. 

^ Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 25. Cf. also iv. 8, i. 

* Thuc. W, 67. 7 xhuc. iv. 50. 

* Ach. 64 ; the embassy left in 430 and got back in 425, we are told ! 

15 



226 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

at the highest salaries and stayed away for years on end, 
and then returned with sham " Eyes." But Syracuse 
harbour altered every international relation in the world, 
and the King began by claiming his arrears of seventy years 
of tribute.^ The Spartans again started negotiations — this 
time with Tissaphernes — on the basis of the abandonment 
of the Asiatic Greeks. Three drafts of their treaty of Miletus 
are quoted by Thucydides,^ the first so scandalously drawn 
as to cede to the King all territory or cities he or his ancestors 
had ever occupied — which, as the Spartan Lichas said, would 
give him Thessaly and Boeotia^ — more, one may imagine, 
than either party expected or wished. The third confines 
the concessions to Asia, which was considerable enough. 
Meanwhile a Phoenician fleet was built, or at any rate 
launched — for what purpose the Greeks were not clear ; it 
might be to help the Spartans, or, if Alcibiades prevailed, to 
help the Athenians, or neither. In any case, Persia was in 
the ascendant, and her Western policy was being guided a 
great deal by Tissaphernes, who was a recognized enemy of 
the Greeks,* cunning, crooked, and unscrupulous. 

At this point Alcibiades comes into the story, with the 
famous advice he gave to Tissaphernes. No doubt it was 
not from Tissaphernes that Thucydides learnt of it. Herodotus 
tells us of counsel given by Demaratos to Xerxes, while the 
succession to Darius was still undecided, but he thinks that 
even without the counsel Xerxes would have been King.^ 
Tissaphernes, we may believe, listened to the brilliant Greek, 
and took his own shifty course. The advice was sound ^ — 
not to be in a hurry to end the Peloponnesian War, but, with 
a minimum of expense and complete safety for himself, to 
allow the two chief Greek powers to wear each other out ; 
in any case, not to let the same Greek state control both sea 
and land, but to secure that empire in the Greek w^orld was 
divided, to keep a fairly even balance between them — one 
of them always available for the King's purposes and ready 
to thwart and injure the other. Thucydides says that, to 

1 Thuc. viii. 5. ^ Thuc. viii. 18, 37, 58. ^ Thuc. viii. 43, 3. 

* Plut. Alcib. 24, ra)QC ovv a>v koli ixiareXXrjv iv Tois fidki(rra Ilepcrciv, 
5 Herodotus, vii. 3. 
« Thuc. viii, 46. Cf. complaint of Isocrates, Paneg. 121. 



PERSIA 227 

judge from his conduct, Tissaphernes took the advice; he 
certainly shilly-shallied .^ He had been angry with Lichas 
already,^ and perhaps he had the weakness that often goes 
with cunning, indecision ; and now he tried the plan of 
balancing, which gained him time, and was perhaps as bad 
for the Greeks as anything else he could try. 

Pharnabazos in the north threw himself more unreservedly 
on the Spartan side. When the news of Sicily reached the 
world, he had asked Spartan aid for himself, and it might 
well have been the wiser plan for Sparta to send it to him 
before Tissaphernes. If with Spartan troops and ships Pharna- 
bazos could have secured the cities on the Bosporus and the 
Hellespont— the wheat-route, the end of the war might have 
come ten years sooner, and with much less loss of life and 
general ruin. But Tissaphernes was of higher rank, as 
(TTpaTTjryb'i TMv KuTQ),^ snid Sparta preferred him and got 
what she deserved. 

In the spring of 408 the whole situation was fundamentally 
changed. In May, Alcibiades sailed into the Peiraieus, return- 
ing after seven years of exile the hero of the Athenian fleet, 
winner of brilliant victories, and the hope of his country. He 
stayed a while in Athens, and then returned to the fleet to 
meet with a great surprise. Ambassadors sent up with Phar- 
nabazos to the King had not returned ; they had never reached 
the King at all ; they had been arrested and detained by the 
young prince, Cyrus, on his way down to the coast as karanos,^ 
commander-in-chief of the Persian armies of Western Asia 
Minor. Tissaphernes was in the background, a rather dis- 
credited figure. Cyrus lives in the portrait Xenophon drew 
of him— a splendid vigorous personality, a lover of horses and 
hunting, generous and effective, a born leader of men.e He 
was young and ambitious, and he liked neither Tissaphernes 
nor his hedging policy, and swept both aside. He took to 
the Spartan Lysander immensely, for Lysander, sinister and 

1 Thuc. viu. 46 ; 57. 2 Thuc. viii. 43 ; cf. 52. 

8 Thuc. viii. 5. The equivalent of Kapavos in the next paragraph. 

* Xen. Hellemca, i. 4, 3. A letter with the royal seal, toIs Kdrto naai, 
announcing, KaraTrcfiTrco Kdpov Kapavov rav els KaaraXov d6poi(ofxiva>v. Cf! 
Anab. 1. 1,2, a-arpdirrjv eTroiijcre Koi (TTpaTT)y6v de. 

^ Xen. Anab. i. 9 ; Plut. Artax, 2. See also Grote, viii. 350. 



228 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

false as he might be, was a man of action and energy ; and 
energy appealed to Cyrus. And it is possible, when one looks 
at what followed, to surmise that the young prince was already 
nursing plans of his own, which could be helped forward by a 
victorious and friendly Sparta, under the guidance of a man 
like Lysander. At all events, Cyrus threw himself on the 
Spartan side with emphasis — he had instructions to do so from 
his father, he said, who had assigned 500 talents for the war ; 
if it was not enough, he would spend his own, even if it came 
to coining the throne of silver and gold on which he sat.^ 
He was as good as his word, and Persian gold carried Sparta to 
a complete victory. The Athenian Empire fell, and the Asiatic 
Greeks were never to be free again. The victory of the Spartans 
was the triumph of Persia — what she had lost at Salamis, she 
regained at Aegospotami. The King was supreme in Asia 
and arbiter of Europe. 

In the hour of triumph came the reversal — the peripeteia, 
as the Greeks called it — as impressive and as dramatic as 
anything in a Greek tragedy. 

No Agamemnon, king of men, ever occupied such a position 
as that of the Persian King. '* A great god is Ahuramazda,** 
runs the inscription of Xerxes, " who hath created the earth, 
who hath created the heavens, who hath created man, who 
hath given to mankind the good spirit (life), 2 who hath made 
Xerxes King, the sole King of many kings, the sole Lord of 
many lords. I am Xerxes the Great King, the King of kings, ^ 
the King of many-tongued countries, the King of this great 
universe, the son of Darius, the King, the Achaemenian." He 
stood above all law — the supreme law said that the King could 
do what he pleased.* The greatest nobles of Persia waited at 
his gates for his bidding, whatever it might be ; ^ they vowed 
loyalty to him,® they were taught to put his name in their 
prayers,' they were ready (so the Greeks said, and it can 
hardly be exaggeration) to lighten the ship for him in the 

1 Xen. Hellenica, i, 5, 3. 

2 The reader will notice a change of translation here from the similar 
inscription of Darius. This is quoted from Curzon, Persia, ii. p. 156. 

* This title had not been used by Assyrian or Babylonian 
(Meyer, Gesch. iii. § 13). * Herodotus, iii. 31. 

5 Xen. Cyrop. viii. i. 6. ^ Xen. Cyrop. viii. 5, 27. 

' Herodotus, i. 132. 



PERSIA 229 

storm by jumping into the sea.^ Aeschylus repeatedly calls 
the King the god of the Persians — Queen Atossa is spouse of 
god and mother of god ^ — though this language was not actually 
held by the Persians themselves. The King's unique position 
was marked out by his splendid Median dress, ^ and above all 
by his turban, which he alone of men wore erect. ^ Whoever 
entered his presence, prostrated himself to the ground ; ^ 
where he passed, men stood with their hands in their sleeves, 
on pain of death.® In war and peace he was the one arbiter 
of life and death for every man and woman in his realm — his 
son, his slave, his wife — his subjects, his nobles, his armies — 
over all persons and in all causes within his dominions 
supreme.' All power, all authority rested upon him, and all 
responsibility. 

The Persian Empire had been made by a great personality, 
and the whole system was organized in such a way that it 
depended in the last resort on the character of the King. 
" The greatness of the kingdom," said the friends of the 
younger Cyrus, '* needed a King of spirit and ambition," and 
they were right. But Nature denied such men to the house — 
her revenge, one might say, for the harem system of queens 
and concubines and eunuchs.^ There was generally one chief 
queen,^ before whom all the members of the harem had to 
prostrate themselves ; ^^ but it did not necessarily follow that 
her son sat on the throne.^^ The succession depended on the 
outcome of the most complicated tangle of plots and intrigues, 

1 Herodotus, viii. 118, 119. 

^Aesch. Pers. 157, 644; Atossa was in turn the wife of Cambyses, 
the false Smerdis, and Darius. 

^ Xen. Cyrop. viii. i, 40; 3, i. Ear-rings found in tomb of Cyrus, 
see Arrian, Anab. vi. 29. 

* Aristophanes, Birds, 486 ; Xen. Anab. ii. 5, 23 ; Plut. Artax. 26-28. 
5 Plut. Artax. 22 ; Them. 28. 

' Hands in sleeves, Cyrop. viii, 3, 10 ; Hellenica, ii. i, 8. 
' Plut. Artax. 23. Cf. Xen. Anab. ii. 5, 38, reference of the King's 
envoys to ** Cyrus his slave." 
8 On this, Plut. Them. 26. 

* e.g. Atossa, Amestris, Parysatis, the queens of Darius I, Xerxes I, 
and Darius II. 

^® So Deinon, ap. Athen. xiii. p. 556B. 

^1 Cf. Herodotus, vii. 2 ; Xen. Anab. i. 1,4. See also Isocrates, 
Nicocles, 41, 42, on effects of harem system. 



230 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

through which no one could safely count on picking his way. 
Xerxes, it is said, was murdered by the man whom he had 
delegated to murder his own son, the Prince Darius ; ^ and 
Xerxes was not the only Achaemenian King to be murdered 
at home. The savagery and cunning of the queens stand 
out in the horrible story of the palace. The King, distracted 
with duties and pleasures, ^ the victim of his own fancies, and 
only too conscious of the atmosphere in which he lived, could 
only protect himself in one way — a clumsy way. " He sus- 
pected all the chief men ; many he killed in anger, more from 
fear : for cowardice in tjnrannies is the most murderous thing." ^ 
The old Persian practice of bringing children up " to speak the 
truth '* was as absurd in a harem as it was impossible. Arta- 
xerxes I, Darius II, and Artaxerxes II were not men of strong 
character, and for a century Persia was ruled by weaklings, 
and the Empire felt the effects. 

The reflex from this political system Isocrates sketches 
for us, in more than usually philosophic mood, and he does 
not go beyond what we learn elsewhere independently of his 
evidence. 4 It is " not in their institutions " to make a great 
general or a good soldier — how could a man be either who is 
" better trained to slavery than our house-servants " ? There 
is none of the real training of political life or freedom. Luxury 
and monarchy make cowards of them all — they are unmanly 
and protect themselves by cunning and treachery. They are 
forced to prostrate themselves before a mortal man, to think 
meanly of themselves ; and the outcome is overweening 
tyranny that alternates with grovelling falsity. And he turns 
to the records of Agesilaos* campaign to prove what he says. 
There is much else that confirms him. 

1 Diod. Sic. xi. 69. 

2 The luxury of the Persian court is constantly emphasized by the 
Greeks ; for the comment of Alexander upon it and its influence on him, 
see Plut. Alex. 20 ; Arrian, Anab. iv. 9, 9 ; vii. 6, 2. The transport 
of specially boiled water from the Choaspes, wherever the King 
went, was probably not luxury, but symbol or tabu. See Herodotus, 
i. 188. 

8 Flut. A rtax. 25. 

* Isocrates, Paneg. 150-153. Cf. the life of Datames written by 
Cornelius Nepos — the story of a man of spirit who has to take to 
treachery to save himself, and is at last destroyed by treachery. 



PERSIA 231 

Out of this chaos of muddle and intrigue there suddenly 
emerges, as we have seen, the attractive figure of the younger 
Cyrus. Whatever time might have made of him, had he 
become King, he had gifts of nature that charmed the Greeks. 
He was a personality at last. His military ability, too, is 
warmly emphasized by Colonel Arthur Boucher, after a close 
study of his strategy on the great expedition. ^ And it was 
Cyrus who in truth dealt the fatal blow to the Empire of his 
fathers. It was not that he intrigued and rebelled, but that 
he marched a body of 13,000 Greeks right into the heart of 
the kingdom, and with their aid ignominiously defeated the 
Great King in battle. Cyrus fell, but his Greek troops fought 
their way to the sea and got back to Greece. They brought 
with them a new knowledge of what the Persian Empire had 
become ; and the knowledge was fatal. ^ 

The Ten Thousand could tell their countrymen of an 
Empire where government had broken down. They had been 
enlisted, some of them, to help the prince Cyrus to make war 
on another of his brother's satraps — his mother, they learnt, 
approved, and the Great King was well content to see his 
governors waging civil war in his domains.^ They had marched 
with Cyrus for hundreds of miles, practically unopposed — a 
Persian governor, it appeared, could levy troops and march 
from the Aegaean to the Orontes, if he chose, to avenge an 
injury on a fellow-satrap (Abrokomas *) , and no one would 
stop him. They had travelled through kingdoms whose 
loyalty to the King was patently of the slightest — Syennesis 
was king of Cilicia, whichever brother was Great King. They 
found Mysians, Pisidians, and Lycaonians, prosperous and 
independent, in Asia Minor itself.* They had heard — the 
Greeks had read it in Herodotus — of three satrapies on the 
Caspian Sea ; ^ what they found was a mountain region full of 
savage tribes, far more dangerous than the royal troops, and 

1 UAnahase de XSnophon, pp. 86-88. See Chapter VIII. p. 246. 

2 Isocrates, Paneg. 138-149 ; adding with a sting, ■ * more safely than 
the ambassadors who went up to the King to treat for friendship.*' 
Cf. Xen. Hellenica, i. 4, 4-7 ; Polybius, iii. 6, 9-13. 

3 yien.Anah.i. i, 8. 

* Xen. Anah. i. 3, 20. 

* Xen. Anah. iii. 2, 23 ; cf. ii. 5, 13. 

* See Maspero, Passing of Empires, p. 774 ; Herodotus, iii. 94. 



232 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

none with the least regard for the Great King ; ^ nay, the 
King had to pay the Mardians and other robber tribes toll to 
reach his summer palace in Ecbatana ; ^ and before long 
Greece had their story confirmed by rumours of the disastrous 
failure of Artaxerxes to reduce the Cadusii.^ When they 
reached the Euxine and travelled along the North of Asia 
Minor, they found the Paphlagonians a strong military nation, 
proud of their cavalry and independent of the King ; * the 
Bithynians also independent ; and a number of Greek towns, 
such as Herakleia, independent too. 

All this they told the Greek world, and it was true. Had 
they not marched where they would, defeated the Great King 
in drawn battle — " beaten him at his doors, laughed and come 
away " ^ — defied alike the cavalry of his satraps and the 
ambushes of the mountaineers — demonstrated in short that 
there were no troops like Greek hoplites — demonstrated, too, 
that the Persians themselves knew it and avowed it ? Why 
had Cyrus chosen to depend on Greek troops ? What did it 
mean that, now his rebellion was over, the satraps were 
beginning freely to engage Greek mercenaries ? * Was it to 
fight one another, or to fight their sovereign ? Again, look 
at the naval and military power of Evagoras in Cyprus, or at 
Egypt in rebellion — and Egypt was in rebellion off and on, 
under one dynasty or another, for half a century from the death 
of Darius II in 405. Was not the Empire on the verge of 
break-down ? A united movement in Greece, and Persia 
would be gone. 

Not yet. For, a few years after his victory over his 
brother, Artaxerxes avenged himself on the Spartans who 
had supported Cyrus, and whom he hated. A Persian envoy 

1 Andb. iv. 3, 2 ; and especially iii. 5, 16, the lost army of the King 
in Kurdistan. 

* Strabo, c. 524, on the authority of Nearchus, who of course may be 
speaking of a later development. E. R. Bevan, House of Seleucus, 
i. 77-86, suggests that the power of the government had never reached 
very far from the high roads. 

3 Plut. Arta^, 24 ; Diod. Sic. xv. 8. * Anab. v. 6, 8. 

^ The actual words used, in Anab. ii. 4, 4. 

» Cf. Isocrates, Paneg. 134-135 ; Philip, 125-126. A little later 
among the mercenaries are Iphicrates (Diod. Sic. xv. 41), Chabrias (Plut. 
Ages. s6), and King Agesilaos himself in his old age (Xen. Ages. 
2, 28 ; Plut. Ages. 36). 



PERSIA 233 

appeared in Greece with a subsidy, and all Greece was in arms 
against itself (395 B.C.). A Persian fleet, next year, though 
under a Greek admiral, swept the Spartan from the sea (the 
battle of Cnidos, August, 394). Pharnabazos was cured of all 
friendliness for Spartans, and, at a hint from Conon, fell back 
on Alcibiades' plan of getting the Greek powers on a level — 
and rebuilt the walls that linked Athens to the sea and made her 
independent. Then the Spartans themselves came to terms 
and asked peace, and received what posterity calls the Peace 
of Antalkidas but what contemporaries called, with a bitter 
accuracy, that heightened the shame of it, the King's Peace. 
This finally and definitely gave the Asiatic Greeks to the King, 
while it made him arbiter, manager, '* quartermaster," and 
absolute lord of all Greece.^ The biting words of Isocrates 
accentuate the complete triumph of the King. 

The King had triumphed, and yet everybody knew it was 
a victory of the Persian kind — like the only victory Tissa- 
phernes won over the Ten Thousand — an affair of lies and 
treachery and darics. The satraps knew it, and they knew 
the King, and protected themselves by hiring Greek mercen- 
aries and by rebellion — like the faithful Datames, fallen on 
evil times and denounced by traitor tongues ; they rebelled 
one after another ; and if they were reduced, it was because 
they sold one another to the King. 

It was seventy years after the rebellion of Cyrus before the 
Empire actually fell. Agesilaos had attempted to overthrow 
it. His wish to start like Agamemnon with a solemn ritual at 
Aulis 2 was a symbol of his intention to march as far up country 
as he could, to capture the King if he could ; but the ritual 
and the expedition achieved nothing — nothing, unless we 
reckon, as we should, a second demonstration that the Persian 
had no troops to match against Greek hoplites and that a 
strong Greek force might march where it pleased in the King's 
country. It was Alexander who overthrew Persia, and 
Polybius thus sums up the causes of his expedition.^ It was 

^ Isocrates, Paneg. 120, 121. 

2 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 3. The Homeric touch reappears in Alex- 
ander very markedly. Cf. Pint, de fort. Alex. i. c. 4. 'Kki^dvbpov 
TTjv 'Aaiav e^rjfxfpovvros "Ofxrjpos rjv avdyvaxrixa. 

^ Polybius, iii. 6, 9-13. 



234 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

not to avenge the wrongs Persia had done to Greece ^ — that 
was a mere pretext ; it was that he knew the meaning of 
Xenophon's retreat, of Agesilaos' fihbustering ; that he knew 
Persia was weak and inefficient ; that the prize was splendid 
and that he knew he could win it. 

* Alleged by Alexander in his letter to Darius (Arrian, ii. 14, 4-19). 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE ANABASIS 

THERE are few books in Greek, and there cannot be 
many in other languages, to match Xenophon's Ana- 
basis. A plain tale of adventure, simply but vividly 
narrated, it is surprising how, as one studies it, it grows in interest 
and significance. The teller of the tale is a pupil of Socrates, a 
contemporary of Thucydides and Euripides, and yet in gifts and 
feelings he seems to belong to an earlier day, to be the con- 
temporary and friend of Herodotus. Born in the same deme 
and perhaps in the same year as Isocrates, he is content to 
write naturally, to put down what comes into his head and to 
have no style at all — unless perhaps we hold with the ancient 
critic that " art is perfect when it seems to be nature.** ^ He 
is a man who has travelled far beyond the limits of his people, 
who has escaped for a while from street and market and 
assembly, and seen a new world, and, like a Greek, found 
himself at home in it. He has seen new peoples — barbarians 
as they were called — and he has been interested in them ; he 
has liked the men he met and enjoyed his adventures with 
them. And ranging beyond the common round, he has some- 
how dipped into the future and become the path-finder for a 
new age. We undervalue him in comparing him with Plato 
and Euripides ; his greatness is not theirs, he is of another 
order; but like them and like the great Greek minds that 
made, centuries before, the Greece we know, he too showed 
the Greeks a new world to conquer and proved to them once 
more what they could do. He gave them a new sense of 
power. In plain language, he prepared the way for Alexander — 
no mean feat, when we think what Alexander did and what 
Hellenism has meant. And to come again to our story, he 
gave the world new insight into the possibilities of reflective 

^ Longinus, 22, rore yap r/ Tcxvrj reXeios rjviK av <^vcns elvai doKfj. 

235 



236 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

warfare and demonstrated the military weakness of the 
strongest empire that men had known. The book is a 
pioneer's book — in autobiography, in travel, in military history 
alike, it marks an epoch ; in each it is the oldest we have, and 
still fresh and bright, a human-hearted book of the kind that 
never grows old. 

Something has been said in the preceding chapter of the 
effect produced upon the world by the expedition of Cyrus 
and the retreat of the Ten Thousand — the latter in itself the 
most signal triumph of Greek arms between Salamis and the 
battle of the Granikos. Here our task is different — it is to 
study the book and the man who wrote it, to follow (in brief) 
the story of adventure, and to see something of its value. For 
the whole book is alive, and it is the Greek spirit within it that 
makes it live. Every chapter of it is a page from Greek life 
and illustrates for us how a Greek looked at the world, how 
he touched it, entered into it, and mastered it, and what every 
fresh contact meant. Mountain and river, city and sea, the vast 
spaces of Asia — and all the variety of the foreigner, from the 
Persian prince to the primitive savage of the highlands — 
and all the action and reaction of the multitudinous Greek 
mind, friction, co-operation, friendship, peril shared and the 
common enjoyment of adventure, and the great sense of deliver- 
ance and triumph — all these things, varieties of human ex- 
perience that have never failed to stir the spirit and make the 
heart beat, as age after age men have known them in one form 
or another — they fill the pages of Xenophon, all living and 
interpreted in a dialect simple, strong and true, intelligible at 
once to any man who has any understanding for simplicity and 
truth. Wordsworth has spoken of 

the depth of human souls, 
Souls that appear to have no depth at all 
To careless eyes — 

and one is tempted to put Xenophon in this class — so familiar 
it is by now to find him despised and ignored, dismissed as 
naive and unimportant by clever persons. But for those who 
care to see, the Anabasis is one of the most wonderful and 
attractive pictures of Greek life that antiquity has left us. 
In the pages that follow some attempt will be made to indicate 



THE ANABASIS 237 

some aspects of the story that bear upon our general theme of 
Greek movement between Pericles and Philip. 

In the early centuries of Greek history we meet the soldier 
of fortune, often far enough afield from the Greek city on the 
Asian shore that gave him birth. In Egypt he carves his name 
on the legs of the gods ; he serves under Nebuchadnezzar in 
Babylonia.^ Nearer home he makes a tyrant house secure 
for one or two generations. And then for a while we hear 
less of him. The islands and the Asian cities sink into weakness 
and obscurity, and the great states of European Greece in their 
struggles against one another and against Persia occupy the 
attention of history, and little is heard of mercenary troops. 
There was, it would seem, occupation enough, and no doubt the 
Athenian fleet in its great days absorbed vast numbers of men. 
'* If we borrow the money," says a Corinthian, " we shall hire 
away their foreign seamen with better wages. For the 
strength of Athens is bought rather than native.'* 2 it may 
be that we have here the explanation why the disasters in 
Egypt in Artaxerxes' reign had comparatively so little effect 
upon Athenian prosperity. Ships and citizens were losses 
indeed, but mercenaries lost might involve some slight com- 
pensation if the Athenian plan of paying wages well after 
date 3 prevailed at this period. In the Peloponnesian War we 
find mercenaries employed on both sides — like " the Manti- 
neians and other Arcadians, accustomed to attack any enemy 
who from time to time might be pointed out to them, whoever 
they might be, and in this case counting the Arcadians serving 
with the Corinthians to be enemies as much as any other, for 
the sake of gain." * When Athens fell, and the Thirty ruled 
her, we find them in self-defence hiring foreign mercenaries — 
" whole towns full," Lysias indignantly says.^ 

After the Peloponnesian War, and indeed for the whole 
two and half centuries down to the conquest by the Romans, 
Greek warfare is more and more in the hands of mercenaries. 
This was due to two main causes — to the utter disorganization 
of Greek life, which resulted from the war and involved 

1 Cf. Chapter II. pp. 39, 40. 2 xhuc. i. 121, 3. 

* Thuc. viii. 45, 2. * Thuc. vii. 57, 9. 

^ Lysias, xii. 60 ; which may be one reason why they confiscated 
his father's armament factory (xii. 17-19). 



238 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

economic ruin and agricultural stagnation over great areas ; 
and to the new developments that military science was showing. 
Greek warfare in the old days, as the Persian critic said,^ was 
simple enough — a level plain, two armies, and straightforward 
massacre till one side gave way. The rise of light-armed 
forces and of cavalry, the new attention to siege operations, 
the possibilities of making army and navy co-operate whether 
close at hand or hundreds of miles apart, ^ and the conceivable 
combination of every method at once, made war a new thing, 
far outside the capacities of the political leader elected 
*' General " for a year. It becomes a science, and we meet 
with men who professed to teach it.^ Harpers and dancers 
learnt their trades, said Socrates, " but most generals improvise 
on the spur of the moment." But that day was passing or 
had passed. A more striking and remunerative trade than 
lecturing on military science was that of the man who engaged 
his own mercenary soldiers and then leased himself and his 
troop to an employer, prince, satrap, or city, and took supreme 
charge himself of all military operations or acted under 
another but in command of his own forces. Xenophon's tone 
rather suggests the feeling that the practical man has for the 
theorist when he speaks of the professor '* ready to serve if 
any city or tribe needed a general " ; but the other sort fill 
the Anabasis. Good, bad, and indifferent, like other men, 
Xenophon knew them, and some of them he liked. They 
at least — when they spoke of war — knew what they were 
talking about, so far as a subject always changing and de- 
veloping can be known. 

The Anabasis begins with the minimum of prelude. 
Darius II on the approach of death wished to see his two 
sons. So Cyrus went up from the coast, taking with him 
Tissaphernes " as a friend," and a guard of three hundred Greek 
hoplites commanded by the Arcadian Xenias. The presence 
of the " friend " was perhaps a necessary precaution, but the 
" friend " managed to whisper to the new King, Artaxerxes II, 
that CyxvLS was plotting against him. This may or may not 

1 Herodotus, vii. 9, 2^. Of. Chapter VII. p. 218. 

2 As in the reduction of Athens by Lysander. 

^ e.g. Dionysodorus, Xen. Mem. iii, i, 1-7 ; Koiratadas, Anah. vii. 



THE ANABASIS 239 

have been true, but C5n:us came near being killed, and when, 
by his mother's aid, he escaped death and regained his pro- 
vinces, he at once took steps to be King himself. He began 
by quietly securing large forces of Greek hoplites. He had 
garrisons already in a number of cities, and he gave orders 
to the commanders to increase them with as many men as 
they could get, the best obtainable, preferably Peloponnesians. 
There were reasons for this preference — Arcadians and 
Achaeans, as we have seen, were in the way of serving as 
mercenaries ; and Cyrus had already some understanding 
with Lysander, if not with the Spartan government, to 
judge from the support which it gave him with its 
navy. Beside increasing his garrisons, Cyrus raised troops 
for two or three other avowed purposes. He had a private 
war with Tissaphernes, which Artaxerxes would quite well 
understand, and was, in fact, not sorry to see, for gratitude 
was not an element in this King's character.^ He also an- 
nounced his intention to reduce the Pisidians, and enrolled 
men for that expedition. He further maintained the Spartan 
exile Clearchus in a sort of war with the Thracians who worried 
the Greeks of the Chersonnese. Clearchus seems to have been 
alone of them all in Cyrus' secret. He was a hard, harsh, 
and rather doctrinaire soldier, but somehow appealed to 
Xenophon as Agesilaos also did. With a subsidy of 10,000 
darics from Cyrus and further sums from the cities iDf the 
Hellespont, Clearchus was able without waking suspicion to 
raise a large force, and when he joined at last, it was with 
1000 hoplites, 800 Thracian peltasts, and 200 Cretan bowmen. ^ 
Yet farther afield in Thessaly, Aristippus of the noble house 
of the Aleuadai of Larissa was subsidized. He was engaged, 
it would appear, in a war against the new democracy of the 
town, and was bent on restoring his family ; but he received 
instructions not to make terms with his opponents till Cyrus 
gave word. 

At last the moment came, and the various forces began 
to assemble at Sardis, and their destination was revealed : 
they were designed for war against the Pisidians. Tissaphernes 
had word of all ; and, " thinking the preparations rather 

^ To be fair to him, neither was unusual resentment. 

2 Cretan bowmen in the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. vi. 25). 



240 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

large," he posted off with a bodyguard of 500 horse to tell 
the King. Cyrus advanced to Celainai, and there waited 
a month. At this place Clearchus joined, and Cyrus held a 
review and found he had about 11,000 Greek hoplites and 
some 2000 peltasts. The men came from all over the Greek 
world — even Syracuse and Thurii were represented. Amphi- 
polis, Dardania, Oeta, Acarnania, Boeotia, Locri, Samos, and 
Chios appear among the native places. But we hear most 
of Peloponnesians and in particular of Arcadians, though 
even toward the end the Arcadians and Achaeans seem 
scarcely to number more than half of the forces. First and 
last we glean the names of some half-dozen Athenians beside 
Xenophon and " Theopompus.** Spartans were few — one or 
two exiles, notably Clearchus, and the commander Cheirisophos, 
who joined with 700 hoplites at Issos, dispatched there on a 
fleet by the Spartan government. 

What sort of men they were comes out in the story. 
Treachery, intrigue, dissension were not unnatural among 
men of such various stocks and such miscellaneous history. 
Women of the hetaira class came with them in great numbers, 
slave or free, — one man brought a dancing-girl whom he 
owned, — andshared with them their adventures in Mesopotamia 
and the mountains.^ Isocrates, twenty years later, gives the 
numbers of the men at 6000 — not men picked for valour, he 
says, but men compelled by poverty to go abroad. ^ Mer- 
cenaries, Isocrates says elsewhere (in 355 B.C.), speaking 
more generally, are " men without cities, runaway slaves, 
a congeries of every kind of villainy, who will always desert 
for more pay." ^ Xenophon gives a more favourable 
account of his fellow-soldiers * — " most of them had not 
sailed from home for this service for want of a livelihood, 
but because they had heard a good account of Cyrus ; some 
brought men with them, and others had sunk money in the 
expedition ; ^ others again had run away from fathers and 
mothers, and some had left children « behind them, and meant 

1 Anab. iv. 3, 19 ; v. 3, i ; iv. i, 14 ; the dancer, vi. 1,12. 

2 Isocrates, Paneg. 146. * Isocrates, de Pace, 44-47. * Anah. vi. 4, 8. 
^ Cf. Isocrates, Philip, 96, on bounties given by those engaged in 

^cvokoyeiv at this time. 
«Cf. Anah, iii. i, 3. 



THE ANABASIS 241 

to make something and return ; they had heard that the 
other men with Cyrus did very well for themselves." How 
Cyrus was recommended as a paymaster, we can see in the 
promise held out to Xenophon himself by Proxenos, that, if 
he would come, he would make him a friend of Cyrus ; and 
Cyrus, Proxenos added, he reckoned as more to him than his 
country was.^ The generosity of Cyrus is a frequent point, 
and there can also be little doubt that a commander of such 
spirit and such friendliness would attract men. Poverty 
there was in Greece, and it helped the recruiting officers. 
Long afterwards Theocritus in one of his idylls makes dis- 
appointed love turn a shepherd's thoughts to enlistment 
abroad. 2 

None of them knew where they were going, except Clear- 
chus^ — their goal, they were told, was Pisidia. It was not 
till they were in Cilicia that they began to suspect that the 
expedition was really against the King. *'They were afraid 
of the journey," Xenophon says at a later point ; " but, though 
reluctant, they went all the same, for shame — for shame of one 
another and of Cyrus ; and of these Xenophon was one." * 

The story of the mutiny at Tarsus, when they first suspected 
the truth, is very characteristic.^ They said flatly they would 
go no farther ; they had not been hired to march against the 
King. Clearchus, the Spartan, true to the national character 
and his own, tried to force them, and he came near being stoned 
to death. The use of stones by the Ten Thousand is very fre- 
quent, a blunter and more public way of settling accounts with 
an unpopular officer than the modern one of the bullet. Clear- 
chus on this hint tried the other way — of persuasion. He 
called an assembly, ecclesia, and as ever with the Greeks the 
matter came to a public meeting and a vote. The modern 
reader will remember the storm in Eothen — " where was the 
crew ? It was a crew no longer, but rather a gathering of 
Greek citizens ; the shout of the seamen was changed for the 
murmuring of the people — the spirit of the old Demos was 
alive. The men came aft in a body and loudly asked that the 
vessel should be put about, and that the storm be no longer 
tempted. Now, then, for speeches. The captain, his eyes 

1 Anah. iii. i, 4. 2 i^yu^ 14, 3 Anab. iii. i, 10. 

* Anab, iii. i, 10. « Anab. i. 3, i ft. 

16 



242 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

flashing fire, his frame all quivering with emotion — wielding 
his every limb, like another and a louder voice, pours forth the 
eloquent torrent of his threats and his reasons, his commands 
and his prayers ; he promises, he vows, he swears that there is 
safety in holding on — safety, if Greeks will he brave. ' ' Kinglake 
pictures the men "doubtfully hanging between the terrors of the 
storm and the persuasion of glorious speech," till "brave 
thoughts winged on Grecian words gained their natural mastery 
over terror." Clearchus met his soldiers, and managed to 
weep before them — ^he threw in his lot with them, he would 
abandon Cyrus, and so forth. Meantime by a private message 
he reassured the prince, and then got the soldiers to discuss 
alternative plans, and so on, till by dint of fair words and half 
a daric more a month, the Greeks consented to march on — 
against Abrocomas, though they still suspected it was against 
the King. 

At Thapsacus on the Euphrates there was another mutiny. 
They did not wish to take the decisive step of crossing the river, 
for Cyrus had now avowed his purpose. But Menon the Thess- 
alian, who proved his gift for treachery more clearly later on, 
managed the matter by finesse. He persuaded his own men 
to cross while the rest were still debating in ecclesia — to steal a 
march on their comrades. In this way they would win extra 
bounties from Cyrus for being the first ; and if the rest failed 
to follow, then they would cross back again. 

In this way the army manages its discipline — not quite as 
modern European soldiers would wish it. But it must be 
remembered that they were essentially a foreign legion and in 
no sense a national force. Leaders and men were much on a 
level, and anybody might offer a suggestion. Later on, when 
Xenophon was in charge, he made it known that he welcomed 
such suggestions — " the men all knew that they might 
approach him at breakfast or at dinner, and, even if he'were 
asleep, wake him up and tell him anything any man had to say 
that bore on the war." Xenophon always meets mutiny half- 
way and disarms it by sense and good humour. He will hear 
what is to be said — anybody can speak ; only let them consider 
where they are, in what danger they stand, and how they will 
heighten that danger by divisions and by quarrelling. Back 
to the facts — all above-board — and now in good temper let us 



THE ANABASIS 243 

look at the thing as it is ; and he carries the men with him. 
Or, if he does not, well, they are still friends, and by and by 
they are working together again. Always reasonable, often 
with a touch of playfulness in his speech, he keeps his crew of 
shipwrecked pirates (the analogy is only too close) working 
together till safety is assured.^ The more closely we study the 
Ten Thousand, with their natural and inevitable want of 
cohesion, their gusts of fury and suspicion — " all of a sudden 
we hear a row — ' hit 'em ! hit 'em ! stone 'em ! stone 'em ! ' — and 
next moment we see a crowd running up with stones in their 
hands " ^ — the more one wonders that they ever got through. 
" One unfortunate result," says Mr. William Miller of the 
modern Greeks,^ " of this extreme democracy, so firmly en- 
grained in the Hellenic character, is the disinclination to obey a 
leader and the consequent tendency to split up into cliques and 
groups. The Venetians truly said, ' Every five Greeks, six 
generals.' " Turkish discipline is better; but at what a price 
it is had ! That the most gifted races on earth are the hardest 
to discipline seems a consequence from independence of mind.* 
Xenophon is all on the side of discipline,^ but the discipline 

1 Perhaps the best speech of all is in Anab. v. 7. 

2 Anab. v. 7, 21. ^ Greek Life in Town and Country, p. 7. 

* A very interesting parallel is given by Parkman in his Oregon 
Trail, ch. xxvi. In the Mexican War of 1846 the Missourians, -'if 
discipline and subordination are the criterion of merit, were worthless 
soldiers indeed. . . . Their victories were gained in the teeth of every 
established precedent of warfare. . . . Doniphan's regiment marched 
through New Mexico more like a band of free companions than like the 
paid soldiers of a modern government. ... At the battle of Sacramento, 
his frontiersmen fought under every disadvantage. The Mexicans 
had chosen their position ; they were drawn up across the valley that 
led to their native city of Chihuahua ; their whole front was covered 
by intrenchments and defended by batteries, and they outnumbered 
the invaders by five to one. An eagle flew over the Americans, and 
a deep murmur rose along their lines. The enemy's batteries opened ; 
long they remained under fire, but when at length the word was given, 
they shouted and ran forward. In one of the divisions, when midway 
to the enemy, a drunken officer ordered a halt ; the exasperated men 
hesitated to obey. - Forward, boys ! ' cried a private from the ranks ; 
and the Americans rushed like tigers upon the enemy," and they won 
a complete victory. All this — down to the eagle — is surprisingly like 
the Ten Thousand. 

6 Cf. Anah. iii. 2, 29-31 ; v. 7, 26-33. 



244 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

he managed to attain depended more on his own personal 
quaUties than on anything else. No wonder that, once estab- 
lished at Scillus, he had no wish to campaign with mercenaries 
again ! No wonder that he writes so often, with such wistful 
admiration, of Spartan discipline ! Yet, as Grote loved to 
emphasize, with all the handicaps against him, the Athenian 
managed things better than the Spartan with this im- 
possible army of democrats and demagogues. 

This, then, is the Army of the Ten Thousand, and with it — 
with only two mutinies of any account, and these not without 
some moral justification — Cyrus marched against his brother. 
Of late a military commentary upon the expedition has been 
published by a French soldier. Colonel Arthur Boucher, author 
already of works looking forward to the war of 1 914-5. Colonel 
Boucher is strongly for Xenophon against his scholarly com- 
mentators — " in general, the classical solution, on the points 
where it disagrees with the text, clashes still more with the 
most elementary strategic necessities. The military solution, 
answering rigorously to these same necessities, is in accordance 
with the data of the text." ^ '' It is with the Anabasis,". 
he says, " that military history, properly so called, begins — 
that is to say, the technical history of a war written by a 
soldier. . . . The Anabasis permits the strategist to follow 
most closely the operations of the attacking commander, and 
on those of his opponent it gives general information of great 
importance." ^ Colonel Boucher's criticism of Cyrus as general 
is of interest. There are points in which he differs from some 
established authorities — he refuses, for instance, to concur 
with them ^ in Plutarch's censure of Clearchus in the battle of 
Cunaxa ; " Plutarque parait peu verse dans les choses de la 
guerre," is his verdict,* and few readers of Plutarch could 
question it. 

In summary, then, the conclusions of Colonel Boucher are 
these. ^ He recognizes the able use of fleet and army in com- 
bined action which gave Cyrus Cilicia and Syria, and the mone- 
tary advantage that Cilicia meant, which enabled him to pay 

1 L'Anabase de Xenophon, p. xix. ^ ijjid. p. xxix» 

3 e.g. Eduard Meyer, Gesch. v. § 834. * L'Anabase, p. 131, 

6 L'Anabase, pp. 86-88. As I share Plutarch's disability, I prefer 
to summarize and not to criticize. 



THE ANABASIS 245 

his Greek troops. The commissariat he commends as simple 
and practical, emphasizing four points : the use of waggons 
(of which there were still four hundred on the day of battle) 
to bring food from the nearest revictualling centres ; the halts 
at such centres to rest the army and to extend the zones 
of requisition ; the " Lydian market " allowed to follow the 
army ; and the reserve convoy. He remarks the great rapidity 
of the march ^ — 68 stages averaging 29 kilometres, an extra- 
ordinary figure for a march so long. Twice there were serious 
delays — at Tarsus, in consequence of the Greek mutiny and 
the non-arrival of the fleet ; and at Thapsacus, for a detailed 
reconnaissance of the river — both involving serious conse- 
quences which Cyrus recognized. The march from Thapsacus ^ 
to the frontiers of Babylonia— 875 kilometres in 35 days with 
7 days for rest — will bear comparison with the best that 
history records. In short, the strategic part of the operations 
could hardly have been better executed. In the matter of 
tactics, Cyrus is open to criticism. A fixed idea of where 
Artaxerxes must be was the source of all his errors. " Con- 
vinced of the clain^oyance of his imagination," he advances 
unaware of the nearness of the enemy, only a few kilometres 
away. Yet his activity in disposing his troops repairs the 
mistake, and he is ready. In making his dispositions, he is 
clear that victory in the centre, i.e. over Artaxerxes, will be 
definitive ; therefore the Greeks must be there to meet 
Artaxerxes. But the order given to Clearchus is not one that 
cordd be executed. The success of the Greeks was thus not 
decisive, as they left the King's division unbroken. Cyrus 
seized the moment, routed his brother, and then — fell by an 
act of rashness. Still Boucher concludes that Cyrus had in 
him the qualities that make a great general. 

But if the First Book of the Anabasis permits the soldier to 
follow closely the military operations day by day, the mere 
human being has glimpses that leave him less forlorn. Xeno- 
phon is always alert for the human interest. The raising of 
the men, the mutinies, the desertion (at Myriandros) of Xenias 
the Arcadian and Pasion the Megarian on a merchant vessel, and 

^ Xenophon emphasizes this {Anab. i. 5, 9), 

2 The Colonel does not find Thapsacus so near Babylon as the 
classical atlases give it. 



246 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the camp-talk that followed — the cowards ! serve them right 
if Cyrus catches them, and pity if he does — and the magnan- 
imity of the prince ^ — and then the elaborate machinations of 
the royal family of Cilicia, through which Syennesis yields to 
force what his queen has arranged by diplomacy ^ — the specula- 
tion as to whether Artaxerxes would fight : *' Do you think, 
Cyrus, he will fight ? " asked Clearchus. ** By Zeus," said 
Cyrus, ** if he is the son of Darius and Parysatis, and my 
brother, I shall never win all this without a fight " ^ — the 
blunt suggestion of Gaulites, the Samian exile, who tells Cyrus 
that some say he won't remember his friends, and some that 
he has nothing for them if he does, and Cyrus' magnificent 
answer : " Men ! the empire of my fathers reaches southward 
to where men cannot live for the heat, and northward where 
they cannot for the cold ; all between, my brother's friends 
rule as satraps. If we conquer, then we must put our friends 
in possession of all this " * — so the tale of parasangs and stages 
is varied with the play and movement of human feeling, and 
the chance talk that breaks the march of events and reveals 
the characters whose interactions make the events. For the 
scenes of the journey, the pleasant paradises and hunting 
parks as well as the famous defiles, the Cilician and Syrian 
Gates, Xenophon has a friendly eye. He notes the sacred 
fish of the river Chalos, which the Syrians worship as well as 
the doves, ^ and the hunting in the desert by the Euphrates, 
where trees were none and all the herbs were aromatic, and 
where the Greek soldiers managed by strategy to catch the 
wild asses, but the ostriches beat them altogether, horse and 
foot — and how good the flesh of the bustards was ! ^ and the 
date-wine remains a memory.' 

Here and there is a touch of Persian life. The waggons 
stick in the mud and the men detailed to extricate them are 
slow — Cyrus, "as if in anger, ordered the Persian nobles 
around him to hurry up the waggons. And then there was a 
real display of what good discipline is. For they threw off 
their crimson cloaks just as they stood, and, as if charging 

^ Anab. i. 4, 7. 2 Anab. i. 2, 12-27. 

^ Anab.i. y, g. ^ AnabA. 7, $. 

^ Anab. i. 4, 9 ; and cf. Rendel Harris, Letters from Armenia. 
« Anab. i. 5, 2-3. ' Anab. i. 5, 10. 



THE ANABASIS 247 

to victory and down a steep hill-side, they flew in their costly 
tunics and embroidered trousers, and some with necklaces 
round their necks and bracelets on their wrists, leapt into 
the mud, and quicker than one could have thought had the 
waggons high and dry/' ^ Such importance did Cyrus attach 
to speed. At Tyriaeum, partly to please the Cilician queen 
Epyaxa, Cyrus held a review of his Greeks — in their crimson 
tunics, brass helmets, and greaves, and with their shields 
uncovered and ready for action.^ He sent the interpreter to 
order them to charge, and they did with a shout and a run ; 
and the Cilician queen turned her carriage and fled, and the 
hucksters in the barbarian camp left their wares and fled too, 
" and the Greeks with laughter came to the tents. The Cilician 
was astonished to see the brilliance and the order of the army ; 
and Cyrus was delighted to see what fear the Greeks waked in 
the barbarians." 

The battle of Cunaxa Xenophon narrates in a splendid 
chapter. Plutarch in his Life of Artaxerxes compares it with 
the story of Ctesias ; — Xenophon, he says, all but shows us 
everything actually happening before our eyes ; it is not past ; 
there it is, and the reader feels it all as it moves, and shares the 
peril, as it were, while he reads ; but as for Ctesias' account 
of Cyrus' death, it is " murdering the man with a blunt knife." ^ 
Eduard Meyer holds that Xenophon's story is in no way suffi- 
cient — a mere soldier's diary. Boucher, on the other hand, a 
soldier himself, emphasizes the value of Xenophon's account, 
and its precision, which allows the military critic to recon- 
stitute moment by moment every feature of the action where 
the Greeks operate. 

The book closes with the character of Cyrus ; the plundering 
of his camp by the King's troops ; the confusion ; the capture 
of the Phocaean mistress of Cyrus, " who bore the name of 
being sensible and beautiful," and the flight of the Milesian, 
naked, to the Greeks ; the return of the hoplites flushed with 
their victory to a plundered camp and no supper ; and their 
surprise at not hearing from Cyrus. 

The Second Book opens with the strange situation of the 

1 Anab, i. 5, 7-8. 2 Anab. i. 2, 14-18. 

* Plut. Artax. 8-1 1 ; Plutarch uses both accounts, and the long 
rigmarole taken from Ctesias goes far to justify his criticism. 



248 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Greeks, three months' march from the Aegaean, victorious 
but leaderless, and their negotiations, confused and hesitating, 
with the Persians. One moment stands out. A Greek envoy 
is sent by Tissaphernes to get them to surrender their arms. 
" Theopompus, an Athenian, said : * PhaHnus, as things are 
now, and as you see, we have nothing good but our arms and 
our valour. If we keep our arms, we think we might use our 
valour ; but if we surrendered them, we might lose our bodies 
too. Do not think that we will yield you the only good things 
we have ; no, with these we will fight you for those you have.' 
Phalinus laughed : ' Young man, you seem quite a philosopher, 
and you talk charmingly ; but know this — you are a fool, if 
you think your valour could overcome the King's power.' " 
And here Theopompus perhaps drops out of the story, unless 
the " worse manuscripts " are right (as they often are) when 
they read " Xenophon " for " Theopompus " — or unless 
the author by the name *' Theopompus " is gently allusive 
and means the young man whom the god sent, when he gave 
an oracle of which we shall hear by and by.^ The whole 
uneasy book we may here pass over and take up the story after 
the treacherous murder of the Greek commanders by Tissa- 
phernes. 

The plight of the Greeks is vividly described by Xenophon : 
*' The Greeks were in very great difficulties — ^they reflected that 
they were at the King's gates, surrounded on every hand by 
many nations and hostile cities ; no one would offer them a 
market ; Greece was not less than 10,000 stades away ; they 
had no guide for their journey ; impassable rivers lay across 
the homeward way ; the barbarians who had marched up with 
Cyrus had betrayed them, too ; they were alone and abandoned ; 
they had no friendly cavalry, so that it was easy to see that, 
if they won a battle, they would kill no one ; if they were 
beaten, none of them would be left. So they reflected, and 
they were in despair ; few of them tasted food till evening, 
and few lit fires. Many never came to their arms all night, 

1 There is a good deal to be said for this suggestion. For instance, 
who but Xenophon was '■ Themistogenes the Syracusan," who wrote 
how the Greeks escaped to the sea {Hellenica, iii. i, 2) ? Was the 
Spartan admiral Samios {Hellenica, iii. i, i) or Pythagoras {Anab. i. 7) ? 
Who was the shrewd veavia-Kos ns of Anab. ii. 4, 19-20 ? 



THE ANABASIS . 249 

but rested where they chanced to be, unable to sleep for their 
misery and their longing for country, parents, wives, children, 
whom they never expected to see again." 

And now, with a Homeric simplicity and a Homeric turn 
of phrase, as Grote remarked, Xenophon comes into the story, 
in the third person. He tells how Proxenos wrote the letter in 
which he urged him to come abroad and promised to make 
him the friend of Cyrus ; how he showed the letter to Socrates, 
and Socrates sent him to consult Apollo in Delphi ; how he 
put the question in a way of his own, leaving the god little 
option but to offer some helpful suggestion in a matter already 
decided ; and how Socrates pointed out the awkward form of 
his address to the god, but now told him to go — though at first 
he had not been sure whether the city would like him to be the 
friend of Cyrus, the enemy who had given Sparta such effective 
support in the Peloponnesian War. This doubt which Socrates 
felt is significant — why does Xenophon mention it ? And 
why does he, as a matter of fact, though he is explaining his 
presence in the army, yet give no hint of his reasons for leaving 
Athens ? He consulted Socrates ; but, he half suggests to 
us, he made up his mind himself, and Socrates and the god had 
not much responsibility. What were his reasons ? a mere 
fancy for adventure ? For it is quite clear that this student, 
as he sometimes seems to us, was a spirited hunter and a 
real leader of men. Was it some memory of what the 
" young men " ^ or the knights had done — some con- 
sciousness that Athens also remembered — that quickened 
him to seek foreign service ? Was he among those knights 
who were not trusted to serve Athens again, or not in the 
meanwhile ? ^ 

Whatever his reasons, Xenophon went to Sardis and 
saw Cyrus, who asked him to stay with them ; and he stayed,^ 
and went with them, but neither as general, nor captain, nor 

1 See Chapter IV. p. 1 1 1 ; Chapter VI. p. 187. 

2 Cf. Hellenica, iii. i, 4, where he tells us that Athens sent to the new 
Persian War in 399 a contingent of " men who had served as knights 
in the time of the Thirty, thinking it a gain for the Demos, if they went 
away and perished." Lysias, xvi. 6, says or implies that some of them 
were excluded from further military service and compelled to give up 
their equipment. 

^ Anab. iii. i, 9. 



250 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

soldier.^ On the very verge of the fatal battle, he mentions 
how Cyrus spoke to him again, and bade him tell all that the 
omens were good and the sacrifices spoke fair.^ But till the 
generals were murdered, Xenophon was in the background. 
Now things were different ; the man who could save the rest 
must come forward ; and, stimulated by a dream, he did come 
forward. Modern readers, especially some of a rationalist 
school, have commented in an unsympathetic way upon 
Xenophon's dreams and omens and sacrifices. Some sweeping 
and perhaps swift judgment of human life lies behind such 
criticism ; but the historian does better to judge slowly and 
to study with sympathy. Men so practical as Pascal Paoli 
and Abraham Lincoln have not disdained to notice their dreams 
— some dreams. 3 Few of us, perhaps, would wish to be influ- 
enced by dreams, but the recurrence of this type of great man 
is remarkable. 

Xenophon, it is clear, changed the atmosphere from de- 
pression to hope ; only that, but it was everything. " Xeno- 
phon," said Cheirisophos the Spartan, *' before this I only 
knew so much of you, that I had heard you were an Athenian ; 
but now I praise you for what you say and do, and I wish 
there were lots of you.'' * Cheirisophos died at some point 
on the Euxine coast of a drug which he had taken to allay a 
fever, but in the interval he and Xenophon worked together 
effectively and happily. They only once disagreed, and then 
about the treatment of a native guide, whom the Spartan 
struck in anger. It is worth recording here, too, how they 
chaffed one another. For such things do not receive mention in 
the more formal histories ; but in a book of travel like the 

^ A curious addition with some purpose behind it, which I cannot 
clearly make out. 

2 Anab. i. 8, 14. 

^ Boswell, Corsica, p. 361, for Paoli. John G. Nicolay, Short Life 
of Abraham Lincoln, p. 531 ; Lincoln on the morning of 14 April, 1865, 
told his cabinet he had the previous night had his usual dream, which 
preceded great events — he had had it before Antietam, Murfreesboro, 
Gettysburg, and Vicksburg. General Grant, in his matter-of-fact way, 
said that Murfreesboro was no victory and had no important results ; 
but Lincoln was sure the dream must refer to something important. 
That night he was shot in Ford's Theatre, and died in the house across 
the street. 

* Anab. iii. i, 45. 



THE ANABASIS 251 

Anabasis much emerges that shows us the real texture of life. 
Xenophon proposes a feint — stealing a march on the mountain- 
eers — and, with ^' a little pun, suggests that Cheirisophos should 
undertake it, " for I am told that you Spartans, who are of 
the Peers, practise stealing from your boyhood, and there is 
no shame in stealing where law allows. ... So now is the 
time for you to show your training, and take care we are not 
caught stealing up the mountain and get beaten." " And I,*' 
says Cheirisophos, " hear that you Athenians are great hands 
at stealing public funds — won't you show your training ? " ^ 
The jests are slight, but they let us see the temper of the 
men in the hour of danger, and again illuminate character, 
and the terms on which men of different states were 
living. 

The story of the march it is not needful to tell here, nor to 
discuss the routes taken. At one point there is a good deal 
of difficulty, but when the regions are more exactly surveyed, 
it may be resolved. In any case, travellers — the great von 
Moltke among them — bear witness to the general truth of 
Xenophon's descriptions. There the mountains are still, and 
the Kurds, and, as Tertullian says, " nothing is warm there 
but savagery." 2 Mountains, rivers, and natives — Xenophon 
watches and remembers all, and sees them again as he writes. 
Once more, Boucher insists on the military value of his data, 
and men with other interests have praise no less hearty for the 
Third, Fourth, and Fifth Books. For example, whether we call 
it commissariat or diet, taking the military or the anthro- 
pological view, Xenophon tells us things that we do not find 
elsewhere — things of no consequence to the " scientific " 
historian, it may be, but illuminative. We saw how he and 
his friends found fresh satisfactions on the march down the 
Euphrates. In the worst days after the battle, Xenophon 
recalls the dates they ate — " what we got in Greece, were 
left to the slaves, but what the masters had were selected, of 
a wonderful beauty and size, and the colour of electron " ; but 

1 Anab. iv. 6, 15-16. 

2 Tertullian, adv. Marcion. i. i : Gentes fevocissimae inhabitant. . , . 
Duritia de caelo quoque. Dies nunquam patens, sol nunquam libens ; unus 
aer nebula ; totus annus hibernum, omne quod flaverit aquilo est . . . 
nihil illic nisi feritas calet. 



252 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the wine made of the dates, and the *' head " of the palm, 
though pleasant, gave you head- ache. ^ So in the underground 
houses of the Armenian mountains, among their village hosts 
and the goats and cattle and poultry, the Greeks fared sumptu- 
ously on lamb and pork and veal and so forth, with wheaten 
bread and barley bread, and *' barley wine in bowls," which 
they drank native-way through straws and found " very strong 
indeed, unless one put water in ; but it was a very pleasant 
drink when one learnt the way." ^ The strange honey that 
made the men ill, " as if drunk or mad," is still known. ^ The 
strangest diet of all was found among the Mossynoeci — maga- 
zines of dry bread, slices of pickled dolphin, dolphin-blubber 
(which they used as the Greeks use oil), boiled chestnuts, baked 
bread or biscuits, and a wine of " dry rough quality " which 
they improved by adding water.* The Mossynoeci were the 
most barbarous people they met ; they were tattooed and 
knew nothing even of such elementary reserve as the Greeks 
had ; they cut the heads off their fallen enemies and danced 
and sang as they displayed them ; and they counted sheer fat 
a beauty — the boys of the well-to-do were plump and white 
and about as broad as they were long. 

Perhaps the most memorable chapter of all describes the 
march in the snow.* Colonel Boucher says that " those who, 
in Algeria, have seen a troop surprised by a snowstorm will 
recognize how strikingly accurate is the story of Xenophon " ; 
and he will use the situation to decide the reading. For the 
manuscripts vary as to how many parasangs the men marched 
in three stages — five, ten, or fifteen. Five hours' marching over 
snow in fair weather would be much ; in a storm impossible ; 

1 Anah. ii. 2, 15-16. 

^ Anah. iv. 5, 25-31. Ainsworth in 1844 and von Moltke later 
found the people still living underground, and Boucher, p. 217, gives 
a photograph of some houses of the kind. Ainsworth, On the Track of 
the Ten Thousand, p. 178, adds, ■' The barley- wine I never met with." 
TertuUian, adv. Marcion. i. i , appears to refer to some of the customs of 
the Mossynoeci. 

3 Ainsworth, op. cit. p. 190, suggests the honey is probably from the 
flower of the rose-laurel, Nerium oleander, of the family of Apocynae. 
Strabo, 549, a story how it was put in the way of Pompey's soldiers, who 
were cut up before they recovered from its effects. 

* Mossynoeci, Anah. v. 4, 1-34. ^ Anah. iv. 5. 



THE ANABASIS 253 

and he concludes for ten parasangs in three days.^ As a soldier, 
he comments with Xenophon upon the boots of the men — 
Xenophon noticed that the new-made brogues of raw leather, 
that they were now wearing, froze to the feet, if they did not 
take them off at night. 2 The march in the driving snow, 
which kept falling till it was six feet deep, must have been 
appalling. Ainsworth records his experience of the differ- 
ence in temperatures between the hot plains of Mesopotamia 
and the Armenian uplands in 1839,^ and the Greeks had been 
equipped for Mesopotamia. In their distress, one of the 
soothsayers suggested sacrifice to the wind ; and when it was 
done, says Xenophon, " the violence of the storm distinctly 
seemed to all to abate." * After this came other experiences, 
bulimia or false hunger, frost-bite and snow-blindness, which 
Xenophon well describes,^ noting, as he goes, what remedies 
had been found of use. At a later stage Xenophon was accused 
of using personal violence to the men. It was in these days 
of marching through the snow that he did it — to sit and rest, 
he found, was dangerous, and at any cost he made the men get 
up and move and save themselves, against their will, from frost- 
bite and death. Many men and beasts, as it was, perished. 
The speech in which he defends himself has all his cleverness 
and charm. ^ 

The most famous episode in the retreat is the first sight 

1 Boucher, p. 216. He, with Grote, holds that pavasang, Hke the 
m.odQxiii*faYsakh, is roughly an hour's march — not a uniform distance 
at all. 

2 Cf . the prevalence of frost-bite from a similar cause in the trenches 
in the winter of 19 14-5. 

3 Ainsworth, op. cit. p. 173. 

* Cf . the sacrifice by the Magians to the wind at Artemisium (Hero- 
dotus, vii. 191), and what followed. See Chapter I. p. 22. 

5 Cf. Ralph Stock, Confessions of a Tenderfoot (1913) : "I have vivid 
recollections of my first experience of snow-blindness. I was riding over 
snow-plains that glistened and glittered like a sea of diamonds in the 
midday sun, when I became aware of tiny red spots floating between 
my eyes and the horse's ears. They grew rapidly to the size of billiard 
balls, and finally burst into a blood-red mist that swirled and eddied 
before my eyes, blotting out the world as completely as a red window- 
blind. My mount took me home — trust a horse for knowing his own 
stable — but it was three days before I came out of a darkened room 
with blood-shot eyes." 

* Anah. v. 8, 2-26. 



254 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

of the sea.i A guide is given them at Gymnias who under- 
takes to bring them in five days to a place from which they will 
see the Eiixine ; and meantime they march throughj^the land 
of enemies of his tribe, burning and harrying as they go. 
" They come to the mountain on the fifth day, and its name 
was Theches. And when the men in front climbed it and saw 
the sea, there was great shouting. On hearing this, Xenophon 
and the rear-guard thought that other enemies must be attack- 
ing them in front ; for people were pursuing them out of the 
country which was all aflame, and of these the rear-guard 
had killed some, and caught others alive by means of an 
ambush, and had taken about twenty wicker shields covered 
with raw hides of shaggy oxen. And when the shouting 
grew louder and nearer, and those who from time to time came 
up joined the shouters at a run, and the shouting grew in 
volume as more men came, it seemed to Xenophon to be some- 
thing of more import. So he mounted his horse, and, taking 
with him Lycios and the cavalry, galloped to the rescue. And 
very quickly, then, they hear the soldiers shouting and passing 
the word along : The Sea ! The Sea I Then they all came 
running, rear-guard and all, and the baggage animals were 
driven up and the horses. When they had all come to the 
height, then |they fell to embracing one another, and the 
generals and the captains, with tears. And on a sudden, 
some one or other passed the word, and the soldiers bring 
stones and build a huge cairn. Then they hung on it a 
lot of raw cowhides and staves and the captured wicker 
shields ; and the guide with his own hands began to cut up 
the shields and told the others to do the same. After this 
the Greeks sent the guide home again, and gave him gifts 
from the common stock, a horse and a silver bowl, a Persian 
dress and ten darics ; and he asked for their rings and had 
many given him by the soldiers." What a memory to carry 
with one ! Whenever it was that Xenophon wrote his Anabasis 

1 Anab. iv. 7, 21-27. I have deliberately tried in this rendering to 
keep close to the simplicity and structure of the original, but perhaps 
have been too bald and literal. Mr. Dakyns, to whose translations of 
Xenophon, with their scholarly introductions, students owe much, 
always seems to me to do Xenophon into English of a texture a good 
deal sprucer than the Greek. 



THE ANABASIS 255 

—and some parts of it were written years after — the fact that 
stands out is his wonderful gift of carrying a scene, a great 
moment, a conversation, in his head ; and when he recalls it, 
he lives it over again, and his reader, as Plutarch said, lives 
through it with him. 

The sea was not the end of their difficulties by any means, 
but, instead of difficulties, let us turn to festivals. When 
they were first starting on their long march against the King, 
and had reached Peltae, Xenias, the Arcadian captain of the 
body-guard (who, as we have seen, deserted from Myriandros), 
celebrated the Arcadian festival of the Lycaea with his fellow- 
countrymen ; there was a sacrifice, and then athletic contests, 
and the prizes were headbands of gold. Cyrus, we are told, 
went to watch, and, we may imagine, Xenophon.^ Another 
festival with a sacrifice and an athletic competition was held 
at Trapezus under the management of Dracontius, a Spartan, 
a man exiled from boyhood for killing another boy. Captives 
took part in one race ; Cretans, sixty of them, in another ; 
there was wrestling, boxing, and the pancration — " a beautiful 
spectacle,'* ending with a terrific horse-race downhill to the 
beach and up again, with tumbles and shouting and laughter. 2 
Later on, when they made peace with Corylas, the Paphla- 
gonian chief, the Greek generals gave an entertainment to the 
ambassadors. 3 They had plenty of captured animals for food, 
they lay on truckle beds at dinner, and drank from horn-cups 
of the country's make. Then came the libations and the 
paean, and *' first of all some Thracians stood up and danced 
to the flute, in full armour, leaping high into the air and very 
lightly, and used their swords ; and finally one struck the other, 
as it appeared to everybody, and he fell with great art, and the 
Paphlagonians cried out. Then the man who dealt the blow 
stripped the arms off the fallen man and went out chanting 
Sitalkas (the Thracian King) ; and other Thracians carried 
out the other man as if dead, though really he had suffered 
nothing. Aenianians and Magnesians followed, and danced 
the Karpeia under arms ; and this is the method of the dance. 
One man lays aside his arms and sows and drives a yoke of 
oxen, often looking round as if he were afraid ; and then a 
robber comes, and when he sees him he snatches up his arms 

^ Anah. i. 2, 10. ^ Anab. iv. 8, 25-28. * Anab. vi. i. 



256 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and runs to meet him and fights in front of the oxen — all in 
rhythm, to the flute ; and finally the robber binds the man 
and drives off the oxen, or, sometimes, the driver binds the 
robber and drives him along with the oxen with his hands tied 
behind him/* A Mysian came next, with a pantomimic dance, 
as if he were fighting two men at once, twirling about, with 
some somersaults thrown in — "a beautiful sight " — which 
he followed up with the Persian dance with shields, all in 
rhythm, to the flute. He was succeeded by Arcadians in 
national dances, also under arms, as they do it in procession 
to the gods. The Paphlagonians were surprised to see such 
dances under arms ; so '* the Mysian talked to an Arcadian 
who owned a dancing girl, and brought her on, after dressing 
her with the utmost beauty and giving her a light shield. 
She danced the Pyrrhiche very gracefully. There was much 
clapping, and the Paphlagonians asked ii women also fought 
beside them in battle, and they answered that it was the 
women who drove the King out of the camp." 

The skill with which all this gaiety, this medley of national 
and tribal life and character, the snatches of natural talk, are 
woven into the military record and the tale of adventure, makes it 
admirable reading and gives the book a high value. We lose a 
great deal by not realizing the simpler side of Greek life, and the 
relations of the Greek with his neighbours. No book that the 
Greeks have left us — not even Herodotus himself — has given us 
quite this full and easy range over the fringes of the Greek 
world ; and we have yet to think of the Euxine and of Thrace. 

The Greek cities of the Euxine are, in a way, a world by 
themselves. Stupendous mountain barriers and unconquer- 
able barbarian tribes were a safeguard for them against the 
Persian Empire. It is little in general that we hear of them. 
Of the cities on the northern shore, among the wheat lands, we 
hear something — many things, indeed, incidental to the wheat 
trade and its control reach us,^ but the first real picture of 
life in these regions is given us centuries later than our present 
period by Dio Chrysostom, in one of the two really charming 
sketches that he has left.^ He pictures an old-world place. 

^ Some references to this in Chapter X. 

2 Dio Chrysostom, Borystheniticos, Or. xxxvi. (von Arnim), with 
which Grote deals in his last chapter. The other to which I refer is 



THE ANABASIS 257 

The Greek seems to have been cut off there from most of the 
main currents of national life and to have kept, as French 
Canada long kept, an air of another day. Something of this 
may be due to Dio's art, just as a parallel study, made 
three centuries later still by Synesius, of life in the back parts 
of the Cyrenaica, suggests the imitation of Dio himself.^ 
In the fourth and third centuries young men from Pontus 
(as we shall see in a later chapter) came to Athens for their 
education, and probably did not return home quite so un- 
sophisticated as the attractive lad with whom Dio discussed 
Homer. It is likely enough that they preferred not to return 
to Scythia at all. But the northern shore does not come 
into Xenophon's story. 

What invasion by an army of some 10,000 hoplites, with 
women and children and slaves, — suddenly launched over 
the mountain range and rolling down upon them, — meant 
to these cities, we may in some degree imagine, perhaps, in 
the light of modern war, but the ancients were less scrupulous. 
Andrapodize is not in the modem vocabulary of warfare, in 
any language. ^ One can only guess at the population of 
Trapezus — what could it be ? Twenty thousand people made 
a big city — Bristol or Glasgow — in the days of the Common- 
wealth. If Trapezus had so many inhabitants, away at the 
world's end all by itself, its nearest Greek neighbours many 
miles away, the disturbance made by the sudden advent of 
the Ten Thousand must have been terrible. Adventurers 
one and all, reckless and undisciplined, newly free from 
desperate perils, eager to get away to Greece and resolved 
never to return — there was no predicting what they might 
do. Murder and pillage on a small scale were very obvious ; 
the utter sacking of the city was quite possible. What 
Xenophon tells us of the doings of Clearetus in the neighbour- 
hood of Cerasus and of the disorder and danger that followed, 

the Euhoicos, vii., for which see the Countess Martinengo Cesaresco's 
pleasant book, The Outdoor Life in Greek and Roman Poets, ch. iv. 

1 Letter 148. See Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, p. 334. 
Both he and Dio speak of Homer as the sole literature of these 
places. 

2 Cf. Anab. ii. 4, 27. Tissaphernes lets the Greeks plunder the villages 
of Parysatis ttXtju dv8pa7r6d<ov — they were not to make slaves of the 
people. 

17 



258 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

is typical.^ We can understand that the Greek inhabitants 
of the scattered cities of the coast were eager to aid their 
visitors in getting away — even to the extent of making roads 
for them for the purpose, on Xenophon's suggestion. ^ At 
Cotyora the soldiers were not admitted within the walls at 
all — not even the sick — though they lay forty-five days out- 
side,^ and no opportunity of a market was given them. 
Sinope, too, the suzerain city of Cotyora, sent to the Greek 
generals and warned them that, if violence were used, they 
themselves might be forced into alliance with Corylas and 
the Paphlagonians — a threat withdrawn on the expostulation 
of Xenophon,* though anxiety for Sinope was read plainly 
enough in the advice to them to press on to Herakleia by sea.^ 
At Herakleia, at a meeting of the soldiers an Achaean proposed 
that, as the generals fail to secure them provisions, they 
resolve to demand of the Herakleots not less than 3000 
cyzicenes, or darics ; an amendment was accepted sub- 
stituting 10,000 ; and Cheirisophos or Xenophon was to 
make the demand. Both men stoutly refused such a task — 
they would be no parties to such violence to a friendly Greek 
city. Other envoys were found, less scrupulous, who went 
to Herakleia with the demand, reinforcing it with a threat. 
Herakleia, not unnaturally, on the first word of the proposal 
put all her defences in order.® The affair had miscarried, and 
the Arcadians and Achaeans resolved to be done with such 
spiritless leaders as the Athenian and the Spartan, who really 
represented no numbers at all in the army. They went off 
in a body by themselves, till a disaster cured them of their 
desire for independence and reconciled them for the time to 
their old leaders, who, spiritless as they were, had none the 
less rescued them.' At Calpe they came into touch with 
Spartan authorities, and problems of another colour. But, 
before we consider these, there are other matters to be thought 
of, which will take us back to Trapezus. 

When the Greeks reached the Euxine and set about con- 
sidering how they were to move forward, a man from Thurii 
carried them all with him in a short speech. He was tired of 

1 Anab. v. 7, 13-26. ^ Anab. v. i, 14. 

8 Anab. v. 5, 6. * Anab. v. 5, 7-25 ; 6, 3. 

5 Anab. v. 6, 11. ' Anab. vi. 2, 4-8. ' Anab. vi. 2, 9-3, 26. 



THE ANABASIS 259 

it all, he said — all this life of packing one's kit, marching, 
running, carrying armour, tramping in line, and mounting 
guard, and fighting. He wanted to be quit of all this toil 
and sail home like Odysseus, lying full length on a ship, and 
so reach Greece. Every one agreed ; only there were no ships. 
Then Cheirisophos offered to go ahead and see Anaxibios, 
the Spartan navarch who was a friend of his, and get triremes 
and merchant vessels from him, if they would wait till he 
returned, and he would not be slow. So Cheirisophos was 
sent on this errand, which took him longer than he or any 
one else expected. Meantime another man, a Laconian 
perioikos, Dexippos, was sent off on a penteconter to collect 
ships also ; for the transport of 10,000 people, all anxious to 
travel like Odysseus, involved a whole fleet of one kind of 
ship and another. Dexippos, however, was tired of the 
whole thing too, and seized his chance to get clear of the 
Ten Thousand ; and once aboard a ship in his own charge 
he went away for good, sailed out of the Euxine, and left his 
comrades to get home as they might. An Athenian, sent on 
a similar errand, brought into harbour all the vessels he could 
get. If they were loaded, the Greeks emptied them, and set 
guards over the cargo. But the business of transport was 
going to be slow, and Dexippos represented a very general 
feeling. 

For now it became clear that everybody had the same 
wish — if it were only practicable, to get away and to reach 
home.^ The army was going to break up as soon as it con- 
veniently and safely could do it ; and some of them wished 
to go home '' with something." ^ AH this meant danger — 
an army in fragments along such a coast engaged in looting 
was bound to meet disaster ; it could not *' come off rejoicing." ^ 
Yet if they held together, what lay before them? The 
Spartans ruled at that time, as Xenophon said,* and he was 
genuinely anxious as to the reception they might have from 
the Spartans. 

Sparta's support of Cyrus had compromised her with the 
King, and the army of Cyrus was a force that she could neither 
very well do with nor do without. To enlist them would 

1 Of. Anab. v. 6, $;^ ; also vi. 2, 13-14. ^ Anab. vi. i, 17. 

' Anab. v. 6, 32. * Anab, vi. 5, 8-9, Tore is significant. 



26o FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

involve great expense ; but why enlist so many mercenaries 
at all in time of peace ? men would ask. It would be a 
menace to some state or other ; and in particular the Persian 
King, in view of the fleet sent to support Cyrus, could only 
regard the enlistment of Cjnrus' Greek army as a notice of some 
purpose to declare war upon himself or his dominions. For 
this Sparta was not at present prepared or inclined. On the 
other hand, so large a force could not safely be left to wander 
intact about the Greek world, and still less could it be allowed 
to take service with any doubtful or hostile power. Anaxibios 
sent Cheirisophos back to his men with nothing but a polite 
message and a vague promise of enlistment when they should 
arrive.! The promise, unaccompanied by any ships, could 
hardly be misunderstood by the leaders. The Spartans did 
not want them — at any rate as a body — in Greek regions ; 
they would prefer to see them stay away or break up. But 
the men were all keen to reach Greece, and to break up would be 
ruin — as the Arcadian secession showed. 

Some of the soldiers had the notion that they were strong 
enough to risk a quarrel with the Spartan rulers, but Xenophon 
assured them they were not. Look at the Athenian Empire and 
its fleet, compare their resources with those that Athens had 
— it was absurd ; and he bent every endeavour to keeping 
the peace. 2 Even when Aristarchos, the new harmost of 
Byzantium, sold as slaves no less than four hundred of the 
Cyreians — doing it on the advice of the polite Anaxibios ^ — 
Xenophon, in spite of this monstrous outrage, managed to 
avert any breach. The act was typical in a way of Spartan 
rule — the extremest oppression and violence and the utter 
disregard of right and wrong — and Xenophon' s pages make it 
clear, in spite of his long friendship with Sparta, how bad in 
every way her predominance was. His emphasis on the power 
of a single Spartan in a city * reveals to what the fall of Athens 
had brought Greece. There was even some danger, as 
Xenophon told the army, in their being commanded by an 
Athenian, while they had a Spartan with them.^ 

When one surveys the difficulties attending their return to 
Greece, the alternative plan which Xenophon was known to 

1 Anab, vi. i, i6. ^ Anab. vi. 6, 12-16 ; vii. i, 25-31. 

* Anab, vii. 2, 6, * Anab. vi. 6, 12. ^ Anab. vi. i, 26. 



THE ANABASIS 261 

favour, becomes interesting — a plan revived and carried into 
execution by Alexander the Great. He reflected, he says, upon 
their numbers ; for when they held a review at Cerasus,i they 
still numbered 8600, after losing perhaps a quarter of their 
forces in battle, in snow and by disease, and (here and there) 
by desertion. They were still a large body of men, hoplites, 
peltasts, cavalry, all in good training — and in Pontus, where 
such a force could hardly be raised at all. " It seemed to him 
a good idea to found a city and acquire new territory and power 
for Greece. It would be, he thought, a great city, when he 
considered their own numbers and the population on the shores 
of the Euxine.'* ^ go he consulted the gods. Unfortunately, 
his soothsayer had ideas of his own ; a successful prophecy 
had won him a reward of 3000 darics from Cyrus, and he had 
managed to keep them through all the risks of their journey, 
and he wanted to get home to Greece with them.^ So he 
put the story about that Xenophon wished to hold back the 
army, and found a city, and get himself a name and power. 
A Dardanian exile, Timasion,* who also had plans of his 
own and dreamed of engaging the whole army to regain his 
native place, and make it a centre of conquest or piUage, 
took pains to frustrate his chief by insinuating to the mer- 
chants of Herakleia and Sinope that, if they did not take 
prompt measures to help the army out, Xenophon meant to 
stay and found his new state, perhaps by capturing by force 
some existing city. The story went all along the coast, as 
was intended, and the intrigue prospered in the army. At last 
Xenophon had to defend himself. First he dealt with the 
prophet, and then he admitted that he might have been willing 
to help them to capture a city ; but Herakleots and Sinopaeans 
were now furnishing ships, and more than one person was 
guaranteeing monthly pay — well, let them take the chance 
when it offered ; the colony idea was abandoned ; only let 
them keep together and see to it there were no desertions — 
which was a parting shot at the prophet. ^ Even so the matter 
was not settled, and Xenophon had to defend himself a little 

* Anab. v. 3, 3. 2 Anab. v. 6, 15. 

8 Anab. v. 6, 16-18 ; i. 7, 18. * Anab. v. 6, 23. 

^ Anab. v. 6, 21-37. The prophet managed to escape on a merchant 
vessel when they were at Herakleia (vi. 4, 13). 



262 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

later against the charge of plotting to take the whole force 
back to Phasis in the extreme east of the Black Sea. His 
speech was a clever and a witty one : Greece, they all knew, 
was toward the sunset ; Phasis toward the sunrise ; so there 
could be no mistake as to where they were going. The North 
Wind, as a proverb said, took you out of Pontus ; so they had 
only to stay ashore when the South Wind blew ; and so on ; 
and he passed to a vindication of himself and a plea for decent 
and orderly trust and co-operation. The soldiers listened, and 
resolved to be done with lawlessness ; to set up a regular court 
consisting of the lochagoi, or captains, which might deal with 
accusations made in a more orderly way than was possible 
with stones and shouting ; and to have the army ** purified 
as the prophets advised." ^ 

So there was to be no new colony on the southern shore 
of Pontus, though, when in his narrative he comes to Calpe, 
Xenophon looks back wistfully to his idea. It was just the 
very spot, midway between Byzantium and Herakleia, and not 
a Greek city between them — nothing but Bithynian Thracians 
who mishandle every Greek sailor who falls into their hands. 
A fine headland juts into the sea and makes a good haven ; 
there is room for a city of, say, 10,000 inhabitants — a good 
water-supply, commanded by the stronghold, shipbuilding 
timber in plenty down to the very beach, a fertile soil round 
about that will produce barley, wheat, figs, and a good wine, 
everything, in short, except olives. Olives, as we have seen 
already, did not grow round the Black Sea, but were imported. 
If his soldiers would not hear of a colony, some of his readers 
might take it up. In any case it is interesting to find Xeno- 
phon taking the lead in the matter of fresh colonization. 
Isocrates, as we shall see, advocated it for years as a means of 
dealing with Greek poverty dnd of getting rid of the swarms 
of mercenaries who infested the world. Alexander and his 
successors carried it into action. Once again, if Xenophon 
was, as we have seen he was, the real inspirer of the great 
retreat that proclaimed the weakness of Persia and invited 
the Macedonian conqueror, here again he is, in truth, a real 
herald of that Hellenism to which the world owes so much. 

When the colony proved impossible and return to Greece 
1 Anab. v. 7, 1-35. 



THE ANABASIS 263 

could not be managed, what with one Spartan governor and 
another, escape suddenly became possible in a totally new 
direction. Xenophon, and some large portion of the Cyreians 
at any rate, took service with Seuthes the Thracian prince ; 
and once more the Anabasis opens for us a wholly new and 
unique chapter on a part of the outlying world of which we 
learn very little from any other author. Some tone of dis- 
appointment has been felt in this Seventh Book, which is per- 
haps not unnatural. But the whole goes with unflagging 
spirit, and for variety and freshness it is well on a level with 
the rest of the Anabasis. 

Mindful of their long journey in Asia, the Greeks covenanted 
that they should not be taken more than seven days' march 
from the sea, and this part of his bargain Seuthes appears to 
have kept. His proposals were made to Xenophon in an 
interview by night. Xenophon with a small body of men 
left the army, and after going sixty stades came on a line of 
apparently abandoned watch-fires, behind which, well in the 
dark, Seuthes* men were watching. The interpreter goes 
forward ; ** it is the Athenian from the army ; " and 200 pel- 
tasts escort them to the tower where Seuthes waited, well 
guarded, with horses bitted and bridled in case of emergency. 
They begin conversation with horns of wine in the Thracian 
way. After some talk Seuthes says he cannot distrust an 
Athenian — they are kindred of his, he knows, and friends, he 
thinks, on whom he can rely. His father, he explains, had 
been king or chief, but when " the fortunes of the Odrysians 
fell sick," he died (of disease) and left Seuthes an orphan, with 
Medokos the present king. " But when I became a youth, 
I could not endure to live for ever looking to the table of another. 
So I sat on his seat beside him as a suppliant and begged for 
as many men as he could give me, to do any mischief I might 
to the men who drove me out, and not live looking at his 
table. So he gave me the men and the horses you shall see 
at daybreak. And now I live with these, plundering the land 
that belonged to my own fathers ; and if you will join me, I 
think that, with the aid of the gods, I could get my kingdom 
again. That is what I ask." The pay promised is satisfactory. 
But, if we cannot manage it, and ** fear come from the quarter 
of the Spartans," will Seuthes receive any of them who comes 



264 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

for refuge ? " Yes, like brothers, and have them on my seat, 
to share all we can get. And as for you, Xenophon, I will give 
you my daughter, and if you have any daughter of yours, I will 
buy her in the Thracian way ; and I will give you Bisanthe 
to dwell in, the best place I have upon the sea." 

Bisanthe, the modern Rodosto, had once been the castle 
of Alcibiades. If not a colony, a fortress, some foothold on 
new territory for Greece — that seems now to be Xenophon's 
hope, though it is not realized. 

Gomperz for the moment feels it disconcerting to find the 
pious pupil of Socrates and the diligent student of ethics 
laying Thrace waste with fire and sword, and burning villages, 
at the bidding of Seuthes. Long centuries after, Samuel Cham- 
plain joined himself and his Frenchmen, with their firearms, to 
the Hurons in a similar campaign against the Iroquois, with 
whom he and his had till then no quarrel ; and French Canada 
rued it for a himdred and fifty years. Greece had learnt some- 
thing already at Mycalessos of Thracian methods of warfare. ^ 
" Next day," says Xenophon at a stage in the campaign, 
" Seuthes burnt down the villages — utterly, and left no house 
standing, to put terror into the others as to what they will 
undergo if they do not submit." ^ it sounds very modern 
— as we have come to reinterpret modernity. 

We need not follow the story of the campaign. It was 
severe even for the Greeks after their experiences in the Armenian 
mountains. " There was much snow and cold so great that 
the water brought in for dinner froze, and the wine in the 
vessels, and many of the Greeks had their noses and ears frost- 
bitten. And then it was plain why the Thracians wear fox- 
skin caps down over their ears, and tunics to cover not only 
the chest but the thighs, and long riding cloaks down to the 
feet, instead of the chlamys, when they ride." ^ 

The banquet of Seuthes is a pendant to those we have 
watched elsewhere in the story.* The guests sit in a circle, 
with three-legged stools in front of them, on which is piled 
meat and bread skewered together. Seuthes, in accordance 

^ Thuc. vii. 29 : - The Thracians when they dare can be as bloody- 
as the worst barbarians " is the historian's comment. See Chapter III. 
p. 76. 

2 Anab. vii. 4, i. ^ Anab. vii. 4, 3, 4. * Anab. vii. 3, 21-33. 



THE ANABASIS 265 

with the fashion, began and broke up his bread into pieces and 
threw the bits to whom he would, and the meat in Uke manner ; 
and those who had tables by them copied him — Arystas the 
Arcadian excepted, who soon tired of it and fell to the steady 
business of dinner, too busy even to drink. " Give it to 
Xenophon," he said to the cup-bearer; "he's ready; I'm 
not." The cup-bearer understood Greek, and obeyed, amid 
general laughter. As the drinking went on, Thracians came 
in with presents for the chief, one with a white horse, which after 
drinking a horn of wine he gave to him — another with a slave — 
another with garments for Seuthes' wife. Timasion the Dar- 
danian offered a silver bowl and a carpet worth ten minae. 
Gnesippos the Athenian rose and said it was a good old cus- 
tom for those who had to give to the king, and for the king 
to give to those who had not. Xenophon was in the last case, 
and had nothing to give, but when the horn came to him ('* he 
was already fairly well on in drinking," ^ he says) he rose and 
made a speech, offering the king himself and his army, by whose 
aid he should get for himself lands and horses and men and fair 
women. Seuthes jumped up and drained the horn with him, 
spilling the last drops in the Thracian way. Music followed of the 
native kind on horns and on trumpets of ox-hide — music of a 
primeval and uncomplicated style, which made Seuthes leap up 
again and shout for battle, and do a war-dance in the character 
of one dodging a javelin, with great energy. After that came 
clowns and jesters, and at sunset the Greeks rose and went to 
their camp — Seuthes at least with no signs of drink about him. 
Such is life in Thrace, but there are the beginnings of law 
and order and civilization, for they mark out the seashore of 
the Euxine with landmarks to regulate where a man may, and 
where he should not, loot a wreck driven ashore. For want of 
this, in old days, there had been robbery and fighting and loss 
of life. In those regions the Greeks found beds and boxes, and 
a great many manuscripts, and all the things that sea-captains 
carry in their chests. 

^ vii. 3, 29, ^Si] yap viro7r€7ra)Ka>s irvyxavev — a phrase familiar in 
Aristophanes, e.g. Peace, 874. Perhaps the Irish distinction (which I 
borrow from Some Reminiscences of an Irish R.M.) achieves what is 
meant — " not dhrunk, but having dhrink taken." It is an interesting 
admission to find Xenophon making. 



266 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

There were difficulties about the pay that Seuthes promised, 
which need not delay us. But by now Sparta had come to 
open war with Tissaphernes, if not with Persia, and the army 
of Cyrus was no longer a dreaded incubus but a welcome re- 
inforcement. The Cyreians crossed once more to Asia and 
took service with Thibron. With them went Xenophon, 
and five years of desultory war lay before them, before they 
marched home with Agesilaos by the route that Xerxes took, 
with camels in their train. ^ 

If I have to offer an apology for a chapter on a book so 
obvious as the Anabasis, it is a simple one. It was the first 
book in Greek prose that I ever read — painfully and slowly a 
chapter or two was crawled through, and then the book was 
abandoned for years. Many of my readers will perhaps have 
the same dreary memory of it. And then after years I found 
out what a good story it was, and came to see how at point 
after point it is not merely interesting, but illuminative — one of 
the very clearest and strongest interpretations of Greek life 
ever written. 

1 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 24. Cf. Herodotus, vii. 2>6 ; Aristophanes, 
Birds, 276 f . 



CHAPTER IX 
THE NEW AGE 

IN October 1777 the news reached London of the defeat 
of British arms at Saratoga. Sir John Sinclair, who is 
described as the prince of busybodies, heard of it and 
brought word to Adam Smith, exclaiming in the deepest concern 
that the nation was now ruined. Adam Smith was less disturbed. 
" There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,'* he said. He 
was right ; nations are oftener ruined in the newspapers than 
they are in history, and if they are ruined, it takes more than 
a day to do it. Yet, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, a 
day may mark the close of one epoch and the beginning of 
another ; it may bring home alike to contemporaries and to 
after generations that a new age has begun, of grandeur, it 
may be, or of decline. The battle of Salamis marks the be- 
ginning of a new age of the one kind, the day of Aegospotami 
of the other. The fourth century is quite another thing from 
the fifth ; it is the age of Philip and Alexander, not of Pericles 
and Alcibiades ; and by the time it ends, our thoughts are 
far away from the centres that held them in the fifth century, we 
are with Ptolemy and Seleucus, in Alexandria and Babylon, 
face to face with a new world, a new civilization, new concep- 
tions of government, and new ideals of conduct. Demos of the 
Pnyx is an odd memory of the past ; and Athens, which after 
all meant Greece for us — her empire is long gone, and Rhodes 
is capturing her trade ; she is a fortress, a university, a city 
of monuments and tourists ^ — a sort of Oxford ; and when she 
counts in history it is as a make-weight, magni nominis umbra. 
With Athens, somehow, as almost every student of history 
feels, something else goes — 

A Power is passing from the earth 
To breathless Nature's dark abyss. 

^ Isocrates, Aveop, 66, on the impression made upon visitors to 
Athens by the great buildings of the Periclean period. 

267 



268 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

As a brilliant scholar of to-day puts it : " There is something 
wrong with the fourth century. The greatest charm of its 
predecessor is too volatile for language. It is the fullness and 
beauty of Athenian life. After 400 B.C. that is gone. It 
fades out of Athens, leaving her ostensibly unchanged, just 
as the expression which gave all the charm to a face fades 
out of it without any definite alteration of the features." 
So writes Mr. Livingstone. ^ Julius Beloch, on the other hand, 
one of the freshest and most vigorous minds that have dealt 
with Greek history in our times, holds another view.^ He 
admits that the gloomy social and political conditions of the 
fifty years that followed the fall of Athens give a semblance 
of truth to the view that the bloom of Greece is over — " yes, 
but for him only whose gaze is on the surface of things or who 
confuses Athens with Greece. For him who will go deeper, 
the fourth century shows another picture. He sees fresh life 
in all directions ; and, if the nation was sick, it was really 
from fullness of life, struggling for expression. Never before 
or after did Greece produce so great a number of political and 
military capacities ; while in literature, art, and science a 
forward movement reigned of the most vigorous and most 
rich in results." 

It depends on what we are looking for, and (to some extent) 
where we look for it. The eighteenth century in England is 
a very different story from the seventeenth — no Milton, no 
Prince Rupert, no Pilgrim Fathers ; Adam Smith seems much 
more characteristic of it than the Young Pretender ; science 
and sense are in the ascendant, and poetry, apart from echo- 
work, there is none till the Task was published in 1785 and 
Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Yet England, if less interesting to 
the student of imaginative literature, especially if he limits 
himself to poetry, had in many ways never been at all so great. 
But there is no denying that to most human beings the century 
between the deaths of Queen Mary and of Oliver Cromwell 
means incomparably more. The parallel here suggested with 
fourth-century Greece may be carried further and may give 

^ In his admirable book, The Greek Genius and its Meaning to Us, 
p. 239. 

2 Griechische Geschichfe, ii. 367. I plead guilty to compressing one 
sentence rather than translating it. 



THE NEW AGE 269 

us some clue. Those hundred years in England are years of 
boundless life and energy — every man seems instinct with 
force, and, as suggested before,^ every man seems to have a 
grip upon all life, to understand the whole ; he may see it 
from an angle — then every other man shall see it from that 
same angle too. There is clash of opinion endlessly and fiercely ; 
and England and the world gain by it, for, as Milton said, 
" opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.'* 
There are wars for religion, with the Spaniard and the Pope 
abroad, with the King and the bishops and others at home — 
" and," as the humorous Burton sighs, '* all for the peace of 
thee, O Zion ! " And then there is a change when Charles II 
comes home again. There is no longer any national glory 
which the King will not sell, till a new King is fetched from 
Holland. There is no poetry — except a couple of epics written 
by a blind survivor of the old days. And England wants to 
hear very little more about religion ; let her only have tolera- 
tion and be done with the quarrels of churches. Let her get 
to business, and, forgoing raptures and ideals and enthusiasms, 
let her see facts. So to facts England turned — to trade, and 
built up a new commercial system, and laid the foundations 
of a Canadian Dominion and an Indian Empire ; to science 
and philosophy — and Newton and Locke taught Europe to 
think, and the Royal Society became an integral part of 
national life ; to comfort, and the nineteenth century became 
possible. Afterwards, because England was a nation, and 
not a city, other things followed. A man, according to 
Isocrates,^ may escape some things because of the accidents 
of life, but a city has a certain immortality which makes 
inevitable the consequences of her acts. A man may miss 
much by early death, but even a city has nothing like the 
immortality of a nation. With this in mind we may compare 
and contrast the story of Athens with that of our own country. 

Athens had her great century — ^her century of victory 
over Persian and islander, of empire over the sea and com- 
merce, of leadership in everything that makes human life, in 
art, literature, music, all the preoccupations and interests of 
mind and spirit. Her huge ideals became incompatible with 
the peace of the world. " They are the sort," said the Corin- 

* See Chapter II. p. 38, ^De Pace^ 120. 



270 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP |ij 

thian speaker, " that can never have quiet themselves, nor 
let other men have it." ^ The weariness that came to England 
from civil war came to Athens from foreign war. Here 
perhaps it helped England that she is a nation that tires 
quickly of the strain of thought, in spite of Milton's glowing 
belief to the contrary. The day came when the foreigner 
imposed by force upon Athens the peace she needed. Cleon 
had taunted the people, who followed him into extravagance 
only too readily, with being " slaves of fancy," with " always 
seeking something different from the. conditions under which 
we have to live " — with being idealists in short. ^ In the fourth 
century, in spite of the regrets of thinking people that the 
Demos is still at the mercy of clever demagogues and un- 
scrupulous generals, the dominant note of Athens is the exact 
opposite of what Cleon said it was in his day. As far as so 
bright a people could, in weariness they renounced the ideal 
world for the actual and concentrated themselves on " the 
conditions under which we have to live." The sense of fact 
is the dominant thing in the life and thought of the whole 
period ; and to trace its influence and its manifestations is 
the matter we now have in hand. 

The Peloponnesian War took out of Athens far more than 
any modern war takes out of a modern nation. First as to 
losses in battle and the like, Isocrates, rehearsing the cost of 
the Imperial idea to Athens, passes from the old disasters of 
Egypt and Cyprus to the Peloponnesian War and mentions 
two of them. " In Sicily they lost 40,000 men and 240 triremes ; 
and finally at the Hellespont 200 triremes. And the ships 
that were lost by tens and fives and more, and the men that 
died by the thousand and two thousand, who could count ? 
Only this was one of the regular duties, to hold a public burial 
for them every year, to which many from the neighbouring 
cities and from the other parts of Greece used to come, not to 
join us in mourning the dead, but to exult together in our mis- 
fortunes. . . . The families of the most famous men and the 
greatest houses, that survived the revolution against the tyrants 
and the Persian War, we shall find, disappeared in the time 

1 Thuc. i. 70, 9. 

^ Thuc. iii. 38, 5, dovXoi ovTes tSv otottcov, . • . 7» ^T^Tovvris re oXAo n wy 
€i7retj/ ^ iv ois ^afiev. Cf . p. 74. 



THE NEW AGE 271 

of the Empire ; " and he laments that on the burgess rolls 
in their stead are the names of foreigners from all sorts of 
places.^ So he wrote some fifty years after Aegospotami — an 
old man recalling what he remembered too well from boyhood 
and youth ; and he emphasizes how near the survivors came 
to being sold for slaves and Athens to disappearing for ever. 
In the second place we have to remember the great plague 
in the early part of the war, which cost Athens, Eduard Meyer 
calculates, something like 17,000 soldiers, and cost her more 
still in spirit, Mr. Zimmern suggests — " the old hope and 
reverence and self-discipline and joy had passed away as in a 
dream." It may be too that in these years, as Mr. W. H. S. 
Jones has maintained, malaria became endemic in Greece, a 
constant drain on the nation's vitality. 

Industry, too, on which, as agriculture declined in Attica, 
Athens relied more and more, was terribly affected by the long 
strain of the war. Everything had to be sacrificed to ship- 
building, and fleet after fleet was lost. The capital expended 
on ships must have run into thousands of talents. We do not 
hear in the fourth century of the great sums the city reckoned 
up so confidently before the war. Piracy rose as the Athenian 
fleet declined, and the Spartan rulers never seem to have dealt 
very effectively with it ; it meant much less to an inland and 
agricultural state. The occupation of Deceleia during the last 
nine years of the war meant the stripping of Attica of every- 
thing that could be carried away, down to the tiles of the 
farm-house roofs. ^ More serious still, '* more than twenty 
thousand slaves deserted, many of them artisans." ^ The 
industries of Athens and the mining in Laureion depended on 
slave labour. Add to all this the crowding to Athens of citizens 
from the lost dependencies and cleruchies, stripped of every- 
thing.* 

An interesting chapter in Xenophon's Memorabilia^ tells 
how Socrates met a friend towards the end of the troubles under 

1 Isocrates, de Pace, 86-89. 

2 Hellenica OxyrhyncJiia, 12, 3, 4. ^ Xhuc. vii. 27, 5. 

* Cf . Xen. Mem. ii. 8, i. '-We lost," says Eutheros, -'our pos- 
sessions outside the country, and my father left nothing whatever in 
Attica. So now I am come back, I am driven to work with my hands 
to get food." 

^ Xen. Mem. ii. 7, 1-12. 



272 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the Thirty, and remarked on his gloom. Yes, he was gloomy ; 
sisters and nieces and cousins have crowded in on him, till they 
are fourteen of them, free persons, at home ; the enemy holds 
the land, and nothing comes from thence ; house-property in 
Athens will not let — the city is empty ; there is no selling the 
furniture, and as for a loan, ** I think one would be likely to find 
money lying in the street quicker than to borrow it." Socrates 
urges him to set all these women to work ; they can spin and 
weave, and people will buy garments. And the story ends with 
wool being bought, the women getting to work and brightening 
up, till, as Aristarchus tells Socrates, they chaff him with 
being the only idle person in the house. The story is interesting 
in several ways ; for our purposes it is a little picture of the 
straits to which the whole nation was reduced and a hint of 
how it recovered. The walls were gone, but the harbours were 
left ; 1 Athens was still in the centre of the Greek world ; 
winds and currents remained the same ; and when peace was 
restored, commerce began to follow its old lines and they led 
to Athens. 2 

Athens regained her commercial supremacy over the Greek 
world, but her empire was gone. She lay at the mercy of her 
enemies, for the long walls that linked her to the Peiraieus 
were destroyed, and for ten years she was compulsorily kept 
at peace with the world. Then Conon, after his years of exile, 
came back in the character of a victorious Persian admiral ^ 
and persuaded Pharnabazos to re-build the walls — " no heavier 
blow, he knew, could be dealt to the Spartans. " * *' He won the 
sea-battle," says Isocrates, " and hurled the Spartans from 
their dominion, and freed the Greeks ; not only did he build 
the walls of his country, but he raised the city to the glory from 
which she had fallen." ^ So says the patriot ; but it was not 
quite the old glory. The essential fact was that the world had 

^ In a tideless sea like the Mediterranean a harbour was a harbour 
and had no rival in the river-mouth that could be a harbour at high 
tide. Cf. Forbes and Ashford, Our Waterways, p. 145, on the almost 
incredible differences that tide makes. 

2 Isocrates, Panath. (342 b.c.) §57, boasts of Athens eV iXdrroa-iv 
€T€<Tiv dvaXa^ovo-av avrr^v rj KareTroXefxrjdr}. On commerce, see further 
Chapter X. generally, and Chapter XII. p. 364. 

^ Diodorus, xiv. 81, K6va>v 8e 6 tSv Hepcrmv vavap^os. . . . 

* Xen. Hellenica, iv. 8, 9. "^ Isocrates, Philip, 64. 






THE NEW AGE 273 

undergone a great change — a greater change by far than the 
substitution of a Spartan for an Athenian Empire. The centre 
of gravity had shifted, and it took time to find it. By 386, 
when Athens reluctantly and Sparta triumphantly signed the 
King's Peace, it was plain that the world's centre of gravity lay 
outside Greece — hundreds of miles away, in Susa. Still it was 
not clear that it need ; for first Xenophon with the Ten 
Thousand, and then Agesilaos, had shown that Persia was not a 
strong power ; and the question rose as to where the next shift 
would be. The city-state was not to be the centre of every- 
thing ; and men somehow felt it and began to turn to what 
interested them more.^ In that sentence perhaps lies the most 
signal change of all. 

The Spartans had imposed upon Athens, as upon other 
places, a government entirely to Lysander's mind. But, as 
we have seen, the Thirty fell and Democracy on the familiar 
lines took their place, to hold it with a surer tenure than ever. 
It was not that men were necessarily better pleased with 
Democracy than before, but that, as it was with the Republic 
in France in the seventies, it was " the government that divides 
us least." Historians are agreed that the hopeless failure, 
first of the Four Hundred, and then of the Thirty, had dis- 
credited for generations every idea of oligarchy. Thirty or 
four hundred or five thousand — it was all one ; no " Con- 
stitution," which limited or moderated or in any way tampered 
with Democracy had a chance. In their few months the 
Thirty had killed fifteen hundred people.^ Henceforth there 
was no alternative to Democracy, and even moderates like 
Xenophon recognized the fact and accepted it.^ That they 
should be hearty in their acceptance of the rule of the Ecclesia, 
was too much to ask in reason ; they accepted it, and put up 
with its exactions, liturgies, trierarchies, festivals, and law- 
courts ; but they might fairly ask to be allowed to give their 
minds to what interested them more. 

It was long, however, before all echoes of the quarrel between 
the City and the Peiraieus died away. As late as 382 there are 
traces of it in the speeches of Lysias. Lysias, of course, and his 

1 Of. the lines of Euripides quoted by Callicles in Plato, Gorg. 
484E. 

2 Isocrates, Areop. 6y, ^ Cf. Beloch, Gr. Gesch. ii. 192. 

18 



274 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

family had suffered heavily under the Thirty. Anyone who 
wishes to realize with what Thrasybulus and the leaders of the 
restored Democracy had to contend, has only to read some of 
Lysias' speeches. They mark an epoch in the development 
of Greek prose. Long afterwards Dionysius of Halicarnassus 
set about analysing the literary gifts of Lysias — the purity 
of his language, his clearness — ^his power of being lucid and 
brief at the same moment — his vivid way of bringing scene 
and character before your eyes alive, with no loss of passion 
or feeling, and yet naturally and simply — "he makes things 
look serious and impressive and great, and yet he uses the most 
ordinary terms and has no hint of poetic furniture ... he 
seems to talk exactly like any ordinary person, while all the 
time he is utterly unlike any ordinary person." With this easy 
style, " so free from artifice that he seems to speak without 
preparation and on the spur of the moment," he tells the court 
the tale of the Thirty, and brings out the share of Eratosthenes 
or Agoratos in those deeds of tyranny and murder, till the 
reader wonders how any Athenian court could resist the infer- 
ence and the appeal that come of themselves from the facts so 
plainly and movingly stated ; and as he wonders there comes to 
him a new sense of the greatness of the achievement of Thrasy- 
bulus and his friends. " They took oaths that there should be 
amnesty," says Xenophon in his quiet way, " and to this day 
they live together under one constitution, and Demos abides 
by his oaths " — a testimony, as a German historian says, the 
more honourable to the Demos, the further removed the writer 
himself is from the democratic standpoint. The policy was 
sense, moderation, reconciliation ; and it was triumphant. 

The two most prominent names are those of Thrasybulus 
and Archinos. They were together at Phyle, and they worked 
together in the reconstruction. To them we may attribute 
the resolution that the People repay to Sparta the hundred 
talents the Thirty borrowed for the people's undoing — a 
master-stroke in reconciliation, even if Spartan pressure 
helped it through.^ Archinos, however, checked the plan 

1 For the hundred talents, see Demosthenes, Lept. 12 ; Isocrates, 
Areop. 68-69; Plut. Lysander, 21. Lysias, Evat. 59, says the loan 
was to hire mercenaries, and they hired - ■ everybody — whole cities of 
them." 



THE NEW AGE 275 

of Thrasybulus for enfranchising the loyal metics at once and 
in a block. Citizenship since the days of Pericles meant not 
merely service of the state but claim on the state ; and it was 
perhaps not wise to create too many claims in a hurry. 
Archinos' readiness of resource served Athens well in the 
critical days, and his invention of the paragraphe (demurrer) 
put an effectual check on the dangers of the law courts and 
helped to make the amnesty a reality. One characteristic 
thing that he did was the carrying of a law to substitute 
the Ionic for the Attic alphabet in Athenian inscriptions — 
emphatically, an act of common sense, and '* a significant 
symptom of the impulse to unity, vigorous in the race." ^ 

Thrasybulus is the more outstanding figure — the leader 
in the movement on Phyle and in the fighting in the Peiraieus 
— the man who brought back the people, and who led them 
for years, till Conon, with his victory of Cnidos, his Persian 
gold, and his restoration of the walls, outshone him. He had 
undergone heavy losses in the bad days, and he knew who were 
responsible for them, yet, as Isocrates points out in 401 B.C., 
for all his power in the city he respected the amnesty, and did 
not ask more than any other citizen. 2 But the extremists 
did not like him. Lysias, writing for Mantitheos, just after 
the battle of Corinth (394 B.C.), represents his client, in spite 
of the losses to his tribe and the many killed, as " retreating 
after the impressive Steirian, who taunts everybody with 
cowardice.*' ^ There was another rather conspicuous Thrasy- 
bulus of Colly tos,* so the demes had to be used to distinguish 
them ; but the omission of the statesman's own name and the 
addition of the adjective show malice. There was plenty 
of malice, though perhaps it was not always so silly as when 
" another Dionysius " was detected in Thrasybulus — a tyrant 
of the Syracusan type in the liberator ! ^ His last great 
service to Athens was the naval expedition of 389, when he 
set up a democracy in Byzantium, and made allies of Chalcedon 

^ On the work of Archinos, see 'A^. IIoX. 40 ; Isocrates, 18, c. Callim. 
(a speech on a paragraphe, explaining and illustrating it admirably) ; 
Aeschines, c. Ctes. 195 ; Demosthenes, Timocr. 135. The alphabet, 
Theopompus, Frag. 149, and Beloch, Gr. Gesch. ii. 526-527. 

2 Isocrates, 18, c. Callim. 24. ^ Lysias, 16, pro Mant. 15. 

* Lysias, 26, 23 ; Xen. Hellenica, v. i, 27. 

^ Of. Aristophanes, Eccles. 203, Plutus, 550. 



I 



276 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and Mitylene, beside reconciling Seuthes the Thracian King 
and Amedokos the Odrysian to each other, and making both 
friends of Athens. And then he was killed in his tent by night 
in some quarrel of soldiers. Meantime the extremists had 
deposed and recalled him, and superseded him with Agyrrhios, 
the democrat hero of the three obols.^ " He did well to die 
so," cried Lysias, " for it was not fitting for him to live with 
such designs as his on foot, nor to die at your hands in view 
of the good he appears to have done you in old days." It is 
such utterances that make Athenian democracy of this period 
repulsive and serve to explain why people went abroad or 
kept aloof from national life. Thucydides indeed makes it 
quite plain that generosity to those who served it and who 
failed had never been a mark of the Athenian state. Still, 
injustice so flagrant as this to Thrasybulus was a new thing — 
if we may leave the case of Themistocles undecided. It is 
Xenophon who keeps the fame of Thrasybulus alive for ever, 
and here his quiet word suffices : "so died Thrasybulus, a 
good and great man by all admission — avrjp ajad6<i." 2 

With Thrasybulus was associated Anytos.^ Isocrates 
praised them together for their disinterested patriotism in 
401 ; whether he would have done so a few years later is 
another question. For Anytos is known to history as the 
man who prosecuted Socrates on the charges of not accepting 
the gods of the city, of introducing other new gods, and of 
corrupting the youth. Posterity has been unanimous in 
condemning the successful prosecutor and the court that 
voted for the death of Socrates, so that it is of more importance 
to try to see their grounds of action. Of the various books 
written by Socrates' pupils upon the case, Xenophon*s 
Memorabilia perhaps helps us best to understand the action 
of Anytos and his people, for it grapples most closely and 
sympathetically with the actual prejudices that influenced the 
verdict. The Athenians were a pious people in their way — 
which was not our modern way, nor the way of Socrates ; and 

1 The Tpi&^oXov for attendance at the Ecclesia ; Aristophanes, Eccles. 
102, 186, 307 ; Plutus, 329. See Demosthenes, Timocr. 134. 

2 Hellenica, iv. 8, 31. Grote echoes his praise, and Meyer and Beloch 
both remark, with sympathy, upon the sentence of Xenophon. 

3 Anytos and the corn trade (Lysias, 22)- 



THE NEW AGE 277 

Xenophon in the first book of his memoirs devotes himself 
to showing how pious and god-fearing Socrates really was in 
all the conduct of his life, not merely in a higher or esoteric 
sense, but in the ordinary sense of the words. He emphasizes 
how Socrates sacrificed to the gods of Athens, how he believed 
in divination, how he taught his pupils to worship and trust the 
gods and to sacrifice to them — Ka^hvva^iv 8' epheuv.^ 

This was very well ; but contemporaries who did not 
understand Socrates — and who did ? — might be forgiven for 
thinking that the conduct and careers of the most conspicuous 
of Socrates' pupils were very strong evidence that Socrates 
was anything but a moral teacher. Aristophanes long ago 
had shown up Socrates in his Clouds, and the play was remem- 
bered ; 2 and time had shov/n that the comic poet was not very 
far v/rong when he drew the son of Strepsiades. Alcibiades and 
Critias were two of the cleverest young men in Athens and of 
the best families ; they consorted with Socrates ; and what 
did they learn of him ? ^ They had wrecked the Empire, 
ruined Attica, upset the Democracy, established a tyranny, 
and been the death of hundreds and thousands of Athenians. 
Xenophon replies that, so long as they went with Socrates, 
they conducted themselves aright. But they were men of great 
ambition ; they frequented Socrates' company not to learn 
his self-government and self-restraint, but to acquire the arts 
of speech and of public life, and they left him — " leapt away 
from him " — as soon as they thought they were equal to 
political careers. Exactly ; and when in later years Plato's 
dialogues appeared, there were disastrous admissions about 
this training. Socrates there figures as a master of dialectic, 
sly, ingenious, ironical, full of twists and turns and cleverness, 
an adept at tripping up common-sense people and making 
ordinary experience, the practical, perhaps unreflective, wisdom 
of daily life, look absurd. " They find themselves shut up 
at last ; for they have nothing to say in this new game, of 
which words are the counters ; and yet all the time they are 
in the right." * The young men learnt the tricks of Socrates, 

1 Mem. i. 3, 3. See Chapter VI. p. 183. 

2 See Plato, Apol. i8b, C-19C. 
' Aeschines, Timavch. 173. 

* Adeimantos in Plato, Rep. vi. 487B. 



278 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and used them freely ; ^ and it led to family divisions, and to 
ill-feeling wherever they went. The Athenians knew as well 
as we do that of all types the most unsufferable are clever 
youths and advanced women ; — even Euripides disliked them. 
But to go deeper than mere tricks of speech and bad manners, 
there was a strong feeling that Socrates unsettled men. I do 
not know whether Anytos ever read Plato's Apology ; if he 
did, he might well have urged that there could be no more 
damaging admission than the famous sentence, *' the unex- 
amined life is un-live-able for a human being " ; ^ it was the very 
charter of the individualist and the anarchist ; it meant the 
unsettlement of everything, and implied the reference of every- 
thing in state and life and religion, of the whole body of human 
relations, to the individual judgment. ^ Alcibiades' whole 
career was a commentary on that principle. There never was 
any Athenian who had exercised an influence so subtly de- 
structive of Democracy as Socrates. Even Plato represents 
the personified laws of Athens, reminding Socrates how he 
had always praised Sparta and Crete as well-governed.* His 
emphasis on the opinion of the expert was obviously anti- 
democratic. As for Socrates' piety, there was that poem of 
Critias on the origin of the gods, which he traced to the happy 
thought of a cunning fellow who invented an invisible police 
to quench secret lawlessness ^ — a fine outcome of religious 
guidance by Socrates. 

Still the hemlock-cup was a blunder ; it did nothing to 
check the tendencies of the modern culture, nothing to con- 
solidate the state, nothing to counteract the spread of in- 
dividualism. It alienated thoughtful people from the 

^ See the dialogue of Alcibiades and Pericles (Xen. Mem. i. 20, 40-46) 
referred to in Chapter IV. p. 1 16. 

2 Plato, Apol. 3 8 A. I find it very hard to get any clear idea of 
the dates of Plato's works. 

3 This is always the conservative argument ; it meets us again in 
Plutarch in another connexion. Invariably futile as it is, it has a 
certain obvious sense about it, but what those who use it |ail to see is 
the fundamental unbelief that prompts its use. 

* Crito, 52E. 

^ Ap. Sextus Empiricus, adv. Math. ix. 54. One feature of the rule 
of the Thirty noted by Isocrates {Areop. 66) is their contemptuous 
treatment of the temples, built with such splendour by the Democracy 
{Koa-fjifia-aa-av tj]v ttoKiv), 



THE NEW AGE 279 

Democracy. They did not renounce it ; they only left it 
alone the more, so far as they could, and turned to what 
had more interest for them. What this attitude means in a 
modern community, whether state or municipality, we are 
beginning to realize. Where state and municipality are one 
and the same, and when '' some lofty soul born in a mean 
city, the politics of which he contemns and neglects," some 
pure-minded man, who " will not join in the wickedness of 
his fellows, but neither is he able singly to restrain all their 
fierce natures," comes to the practical conclusion that, as he 
cannot be of use to the state, he will hold his peace, and go 
his own way, or, like a traveller in a dust-storm, will shelter 
under a wall, content to live his own life and to be innocent ^ — 
state and man suffer perhaps even more than they do with us. 
The city-state in the fourth century has lost the ** integrity " 
or " unity " which it had in the age of Pericles. The stress is 
shifting more and more to the individual — a movement that 
had begun indeed long before, but was now more evident. 
The whole sophistic Aufkldrung, the teaching of Socrates, 
the attitude of Euripides to life, tended to make " man 
the measure of all," ^ to emphasize the individual ; and the 
individual always likes to be emphasized. The Peloponnesian 
War itself contributed in the same direction. The art of 
war was not the same thing at the end of it as at the beginning.^ 
The career of Demosthenes the general changed many things 
and suggested many — a new value, for instance, for light- 
armed troops ; and the hapless end of Cleon was a forcible 
illustration of the fact that to lead an assembly and to lead 
an army demand different gifts. The length of the war and 
of the several campaigns in it made it clear that finance was 
too serious a matter to be entrusted to an official elected by 
lot, as under the constitution of Cleisthenes. Thus, as 
national life grew complex, functions were specialized, and 
in the fourth century we find financiers, demagogues, and 
generals in different classes. A demagogue and a general 

^ Plato, Rep. vi. 496. 

^ Adam, Gifford Lectures, p. 274, emphasizes that Protagoras meant 
not " universal man," but man as the individual and not the genus. He 
cites Theaetetus, 152 a, and refers to Nestle's criticism of the other view 
in his Euripides, p. 406, n. 12. 

^ See Chapter VII. p. 218. 



28o FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

might v/ork together, and a financier with them ; but, just 
as it appears that in modern athletics Greeks never do so 
well in a team as Turks and such races,^ because every Greek 
must play for himself, so in the fourth century political 
alliances were unstable combinations. The group would be 
dissolved, and the men in it would be hand and glove with 
their bitterest enemies of yesterday against their former 
colleagues. Timotheos swears publicly that he will prosecute 
Iphicrates for being an alien — and then they seal a 
partnership with a betrothal of their children. And what 
became of the state meanwhile ? When it began to be 
tiresome, the great general coolly went away and lived in 
Lesbos. So much for the outcome in actual life of the insist- 
ence of Socrates upon the expert. The expert becomes 
inevitable ; and then, as we find to-day, some one else will 
pay more for him, and he goes. 

In every field of life the expert and the individual had 
a new predominance. In the old days of the Persian War 
they put up no bronze statues in honour of Themistocles or 
Miltiades, nor did they call the sea-fight at Salamis Themistocles' 
battle but the Athenians', and the fight at Marathon was 
the state's, not Miltiades' ; but nowadays most people, con- 
tinues Demosthenes,^ say that Timotheos took Corcyra, and 
Iphicrates cut up the Spartan mora, and Chabrias won the 
sea-fight off Naxos. Statues of individuals were multiplied 
past counting. ** If," writes Dr. Ernest Gardner/ " there is 
one characteristic which, more than any other, marks the 
distinction of Greek art of the fourth century from that of 
the fifth, it is the greater prominence of the individual and 
personal element, alike in employer, in artist, and in subject." 
He points out how, apart from statues of victorious athletes, 
almost all the chief works of art of the fifth century were 
public dedications, made at the expense of the state, and 
recording the triumphs of the people, or giving expression to 
its religious aspirations. In the fourth century the private 
dedication is more prominent. The individuality of the 
various masters seems to assert itself more strongly. Portraits 

1 Pears, Turkey and her People. 

* Demosthenes, 23, Aristocr. 196-198. 

^ A Handbook of Greek Sculpture, pp. 350, 351, 450, 363. 



THE NEW AGE 281 

are made with realistic exactness — Lucian tells how Demetrius 
of Alopece made one of the Corinthian generals, Pellichos, 
"high-bellied, bald, his clothes half off him, some of the 
hairs in his beard caught by the wind, his veins prominent," 
and Dr. Gardner contrasts it with the bust of Pericles by 
Cresilas. " The Aphrodite of Praxiteles had as great an 
influence on later art, and represents as essential a part of 
Greek religion as the Zeus or Athena of Phidias. But alike 
the choice of the subject and the manner in which it is treated 
belong not only to a different artist but also to a different age." 
It was said in antiquity that the model for the Cnidian Aphrodite 
was Phryne, and whether this is true or not, Praxiteles left 
two other statues of her. She too represents an aspect of the 
individualism of the new age ; she and her profession have as 
individuals a far larger place in literature and biography. 

Biography is one of the features of the new century. Ion 
of Chios, with the sketches in his Epidemiai, is a forerunner, 
but the greatest and most obvious contrast lies between 
Thucydides and Xenophon. Xenophon indeed in the 
Hellenica tries to follow the ThuCydidean model, but there 
are always happier moments when he lets himself go in accord 
with his own instinct and writes of his hero or the scene he; 
has witnessed with his own eyes — of Agesilaos on the frontiers! 
of Boeotia, or in parley with Pharnabazos, or arranging 
a marriage for an ally.^ Alcibiades comes again into 
history, but rather as a controversy in biography. Plato's 
characters in his dialogues speak aloud of the age. There is 
Anytos sensible, pragmatic, impossible, with his idea that 
any Athenian kalos kdgathos — '* gentleman," let us say, and 
be democrats with him — would be a better instructor of 
youth than any sophist ; and if we ask, how or where this 
gifted Any Man learnt what he has to teach ? why, where 
but from the " gentlemen " of his father's generation ? Of 
course Anytos is right — 

ducimus autem 
hos quoque felices qui fevre incommoda vitae 
nee jactave jugum vita didicere magistra. 

^ This contrast between Xenophon trying to write in the style of 
Thucydides and writing in his own is brought out by Ivo Bruns, 
Lit. Portrdt, p. 38. 



282 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Life is the best of teachers, even when we only take her as 
a companion or a taskmistress ; but when once her authority 
is challenged, what has she to say — or Anytos ? But Plato 
has achieved here a portrait — doubly or trebly significant ; 
it is not a parody — Anytos would admit that ; but it is a fatal 
criticism all the same ; and that such portraits are made is 
a sign of the times, a new thing. Callicles in the Gorgias is 
an even greater triumph — he is so tremendously right and 
sensible — and hopeless, and never sees it. There is nothing 
in Aristophanes to equal either of them. The later years of 
the century see Characters written with great wit and penetra- 
tion by Theophrastus, but far from rivalling the intensely 
individual portraits of Plato. 

Portraiture and biography are manifestations of that 
triumph of the sense of fact which we noted as the mark of the 
age. Philosophy is another and a greater, and like biography 
it implies prose. The old philosophers had used verse, but for 
analysis prose is the true medium. Verse had done its utmost 
for analysis and criticism in the hands of Euripides, and now 
prose began to take its place. Poetry was of course written — 
it always is ; but the ode on The Persians composed by 
Timotheos in the first decade of the new century is tiresome 
and empty ; as an exercise in metre, we are told it is perfect, 
and, no doubt, it went well to its music ; it was good enough 
if you did not care about the words sung. Prose prevailed, 
and the century gave Greece some of its greatest masters in 
prose. No one by now, if he wished his book to be read, 
would take Herodotus as a model, nor, as a rule, Thucydides. 
But from the very close of the war we have three of the greatest 
of Greek prose writers rising steadily to the height of their 
powers. Enough for the present has been said of Lysias, the 
first to emerge. For narrative Greek literature has few to 
match Xenophon, and no one in dialogue to approach Plato. 
Isocrates had an enormous influence on Greek style right down 
into the days of the Roman Empire — not greatly for the gain 
of readers in after days. Demosthenes was yet to come. 
Names such as these go far to show that there was still abun- 
dance of life in the Greek stock, if it needs to be shown. An age 
that teaches mankind to think, and gives it a speech adequate 
to render its thought, is a great age, even if empire is gone and 



THE NEW AGE 283 

greater changes are coming. The fact and the individual, 
criticism and independence — one does not need to repeat that 
here also they mark the period. 

And what became of the state meanwhile, as we asked 
a few pages back ? Individualism, though the ugly abstract 
term had not appeared, was the prevailing philosophy of 
street and market, unconscious as such potent philosophies 
generally are. When Apollodorus told the Athenian court of 
his troubles with the crew of his trireme, he explained that the 
rowers, whom he had got from the roll provided by the authori- 
ties, waited with him on the ship till they should come home 
in due course, but they were poor workmen ; " my own rowers 
had confidence in themselves and in their powers of rowing, 
and they deserted and went wherever they thought they 
would once more get the highest pay, reckoning the present 
advantage to outweigh any future dangers, if ever I caught 
them again.'* ^ Years before the end of the Peloponnesian 
War this very habit of desertion had paralysed Athenian fleets 
again and again ; and we can hardly blame the sailors, for 
there is a limit to the service one will render to a state that 
provides neither pay nor rations. When a state either will 
not or cannot provide these for its men, it is teaching them 
to think for themselves and of themselves. The same weakness 
tells upon every naval and military endeavour of Athens and 
most other city-states during the fourth century. 

Xenophon gives us a conversation between Socrates and the 
younger Pericles which anticipates or recalls features of a 
later day ; Athenians will not drill (they ridicule the idea of it) ; 
they will not obey magistrates, and they will not agree. 2 
Isocrates complains that they will not face the enemy even in 
front of their own walls ; ^ and the demand of Demosthenes 
that Athenians should serve in person is famous. No doubt 
the change was due to several causes ; the state in peace had to 
pay for ordinary services in law court and ecclesia, and it was 
only reasonable to expect it to do so for military service in war ; 
but there were other reasons. A commercial and industrial 

1 [Dem.] 50, Polycles, 16. This may explain the Athenian practice 
in an earUer day, mentioned to Tissaphernes by Alcibiades, of not 
paying the rowers up to date (Thuc. viii. 45, 2). 

2 Xen. Mem. iii. 5,15. ' Isocrates, de Pace, 77. 



284 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

people cannot suddenly leave all its business for an indefinite 
time, as a nomadic or (to some extent) a farming community 
may. So the states had recourse to mercenaries, and for one 
cause and another there was abundance of these "wandering 
men,** as Isocrates again and again points out, his explanation 
being that it is due to poverty. It may be also that Greece 
was over-populated again. ^ Slave-labour at all events was a 
factor in driving freemen abroad. But it was not only poor 
men who went wandering off as soldiers for hire, or deserted 
their ships to seek better wages ; we find the habit of foreign 
travel established. Actors went from city to city, and came 
to be trusted as international agents. Physicians apparently 
were also a wandering race from Democedes downwards. 
According to Aristophanes, about 388 Athens was without a 
physician. 2 

Chremylos. Is there a doctor now in all the town ? 
There are no fees and therefore there's no skill. 
Blepsidemos. Let's think awhile. 
Chremylos. There's none. 

Blepsidemos. No more there is. 

Thus sailor and soldier, physician and philosopher, were 
content to lack a country, to live abroad and be comfortable. 
If Athens had abundance of foreign merchants domiciled 
in the Peiraieus, we may well suppose that foreign ports had 
Athenian residents. Plato and Xenophon illustrate how 
readily men of culture were content to be citizens of the 
world. One inference may be drawn at once — that, in spite 
of wars and jealousies between the governments of states, 
ordinary people were beginning to realize that one part of the 
Greek world was very like another ; and when this sort of 
feeling begins to be general at any period of history, it is a 
sign of further changes. 

If it meant the decline of the city-state, or even its dis- 
appearance — why not ? The question was already beginning 
to be asked. In the Gorgias Callicles goes back to the old 
sophistic distinction between Nature and Convention, as any- 
one must who has travelled the world and has any strong 

^ This is a guess merely. Most of the estimates of population at this 
period which I have seen appear to me to be rather too conjectural. 
2 Pluius, 407. 



THE NEW AGE 285 

sense for fact. Polus has challenged Socrates on the case of 
Archelaos the Macedonian usurper, and sarcastically dilated 
on his " misery," ^ — and has suffered the natural consequences 
of an argument with Socrates. Callicles sees that Polus 
tripped over Nature and Custom ; so he joins in and maintains 
that, if we stick to what clearly is Nature, and will be done 
with Convention, we shall get a grip of realities. Nature shows 
that it is right that the stronger should have the advantage — 
shows it in the case of animals, and of mankind too ; in states 
and races the stronger rules, and ought to rule. Of course, 
society, to protect itself, weaves spells around the strong from 
the very cradle — instilling conventional notions about " fair " 
and *' just " ; but when a really strong man rises up and 
flings off all this nonsense, all our prescriptions, and enchant- 
ments, and laws contrary to Nature, lo ! and behold, we find 
we have a Master, and there is real natural Justice all ablaze 
and plain to see.^ Real natural beauty and justice require 
that a man, who is to live the really right life, should allow 
his desires to grow to the utmost and not repress them, but 
be able by his manhood and his general sense to gratify them 
to the full whatever they are. Of course, in his turn Callicles 
is tripped and tangled by Socrates ; but, all the same, he is 
not convinced. The supposed date of the dialogue is a little 
before the end of the Peloponnesian War. If the impulsive 
Callicles overstates things in his generous indignation, the 
principle which he lays down is one supremely operative in 
the period that follows. Not everybody tried to play Arche- 
laos — far from it ; but men sat loose to the traditions of race 
and state, and if the state suffered, well ? What did Nature 
say ? If Nature did not speak in Callicles' emphatic way, 
she said very much the same things, and plenty of people 
thought with her. To a certain extent they were right ; the 
city-state was not everything ; perhaps we all of us over- 
estimate the significance of any and every state. Euripides in 
the previous generation had challenged the moral right of the 
state to play with human life. The new challenge threatened 
the very existence of the state. 

One feature of the new age is the massing of wealth in a 
few hands, and the employment of it for pomp and enjoyment. 

^ Plato, Gorg. 470, 471. 2 Qorg. 483, 484. 



286 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



ii 



Timotheos, Chabrias, and Meidias are mentioned as building 
themselves sumptuous palaces — Timotheos even included a 
tower in his design.^ " Some people," says Demosthenes, 
indicating the political leaders of the day, '' have provided 
themselves with private houses more imposing than om* 
public buildings ; and the lower the fortunes of the city have 
fallen, the higher theirs have risen.*' ^ Xenophon describes 
the views of Socrates on house-building, perhaps with more 
than a glance at his later contemporaries; "pictures," he 
says, ** and decorations take away more enjoyment than they 
add." ^ In the grand old days of Athenian greatness, so 
Isocrates tells us in 380 B.C., men did not despise the common 
good ; " they neither enjoyed it as if it were their own, nor 
neglected it as if it were other people's " ; they did not judge 
happiness by a money standard ; their only rivalry was to 
be the first to do the state a service.* Five-and-twenty years 
later, in 355, he returns to the contrast of past and present with 
a still gloomier feeling. In the old days they did not count 
expensiveness piety, nor keep extraneous festivals, which 
involved banquets, on a sumptuous scale, while they sublet 
to contractors the holiest sacrifices. Sacred embassies were 
not managed in a spirit of wanton extravagance, but sensibly ; 
and happiness was not measured by processions or by rivalries 
in equipping choruses for tragedy. You would not have seen 
the many in those days dependent on the chance of a ballot 
at the law-court door for their daily bread, " nor dancing on 
the stage in gold and going through the winter in what I will 
not describe." ^ In those days the poor did not envy the 
rich, nor the rich despise the poor ; no, wealth succoured 
need.® Country houses were better then than those in the 
town ; many people never came into town even for a festival 
— they preferred to celebrate it at home.' Well-to-do young 
men were compelled to spend their time in riding, in the 
gymnasium, in hunting, and in philosophy ; they did not pass 

1 Timotheos' house (Aristophanes, Plutus, 180 ; Athenaeus, xii. 54&A), 
Chabrias' (Hypereides, Frag. 1 37) , Meidias' (Demosthenes, Meidias, 158). 

2 Demosthenes, Olynth. iii. 29. ^ Xen. Mem. iii. 8, 10. 

* Isocrates, 5, Paneg. 76-7^. 

5 Isocrates, 7, Areop, 29, 30, 53, 54. 

* Isocrates, Areop, 31, 32. ' Areop. 52. 



THE NEW AGE 287 

their days, as they do now, in gambHng-houses and among 
flute-girls ; they avoided the agora ; there were traditions of 
good conduct and modesty ; and as for eating or drinking 
in an inn {iv KairrfKeim) — why, not even a decent slave 
would have done it.^ The very soul of a city is its constitu- 
tion ; 2 all depends on that, and in Athens the constitution 
is ruined. Multitudes of laws there are — endless minutiae — a 
sure sign of bad government, Isocrates maintains ; good govern- 
ment depends not on porches full of laws inscribed, but on 
jrighteousness in the individual souls of men.^ His only 
hope would seem to lie in the restoration of some effective 
powers to the Areopagus. 

These preterites of Isocrates point to the present rather 
than to the past. The state in the early years of the century 
was in desperate need of money, and so were the citizens ; 
and, if we may believe Isocrates, the poverty of the lower 
classes remained a permanent factor in the Athenian situation 
— in all Greece, in short. Slave-labour was one of the main 
causes, but little, if anything, was done to meet this ; even 
the great philosophers recognize slavery as a natural institu- 
tion — some men and nations are " slaves by nature." The 
slave competed against the free labourer, and the slave-owner 
grew rich, while the free labourer continued poor, and clamoured 
for state pay, and voted (when he got the chance) for the 
condemnation of the rich man on trial and the confiscation 
of his property. " You must reflect," says a speaker, whose 
speech Lysias is supposed to have written,* " that you have 
often heard these men tell you that if you do not condemn 
whom they bid you condemn, there will be no state pay for 
you." The people live on such state pay, says Isocrates, and 
are grateful for prosecutions and impeachments. ^ 

The maintenance of fleets, the levying of war, the festivals 
of Dionysos — everything was laid on the rich. What Plato 
emphasizes as one of the prime defects of Oligarchy seems to 
be shared by fourth-century Democracy — " the inevitable 
division ; such a state is not one but two states, the one of 

1 Areop. 45-49. 

^ Areop. 14, ecTTt yap yfrvxr) TroXecos ovdeu erepov rj iroXireia. 

^ Areop. 39-41. * Lysias, 27, i ; cf. Meyer, Gr. Gesch. v. § 871. 

^ Isocrates, de Pace, 130. 



288 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

poor, the other of rich men ; and they are living on the same 
spot, and always conspiring against one another." ^ '* What 
they consider," says Isocrates, ''is not how to provide a 
livelihood for those in need, but how they may level down 
those who seem to have something to those who have nothing. " ^ 
Every man for himself — artist, general, sycophant, or 
juryman — we seem a long way from the glorious Athenian 
Democracy described forty or fifty years ago by Pericles, a 
thing of soul and spirit, instinct with the most generous ideals, 
existing for one consecrating purpose — the general uplift of 
all human life. In this fourth century there seems a universal 
want of ideals in the state. " You must reflect," says Lysias 
in 402,^ as if stating an axiom which everybody will admit, 
** that no man is by nature an oligarch or a democrat ; not 
at all, but whatever form of constitution suits his individual 
interests, that is the form he wishes to see established '* ; and 
he illustrates his axiom from the careers of Phrynichos and 
Pisander — " many of the Four Hundred returned with the 
Peiraieus party, and some of those who turned out the Four 
Hundred were themselves among the Thirty." Fifty years 
later Isocrates says much the same * — " let us leave off think- 
ing that sycophants are democrats " — and better democrats 
if they are drunken ^ — " that gentlemen are oligarchs, and 
let us recognize that by nature nobody is either the one or 
the other, but in whatever constitution men are honoured, 
that they wish to see established." The verbal similarity 
is striking, the more so, when we remember that it is not a 
quotation. The state is a club, in fact, or a benefit society, 
and the best state is that which costs least and yields the 
largest dividends in comfort or in cash. In the old days the 
state ran the Empire as a trade, some critics tell us ; it was a 
business, an industry, that supported so many hands afloat in 
triremes, and so many ashore in law courts. Athens has lost 
that industry, but the idea survives ; the state exists to main- 
tain the citizens. It is of the essence of a club or any such 
society to provide the maximum of comfort for every member 
and to secure that all are equally comfortable. In Athens, 

1 Plato, Republic, viii. 55 id. ^ Isocrates, de Pace, 131. 

3 Lysias, 25, 8. * Isocrates, 8, de Pace, 133. 

^ De Pace, 13. 



THE NEW AGE 289 

it was plain to everybody, there was abundance of comfort 
and luxury for a few, and none at all for most ; it was a 
Democracy without equality. 

In oich a world Aristophanes produced his Ecclesiazusae, 
or Women in Parliament — a play which lacks some of the 
features of his earlier comedies, but hardly their wit and 
invention. He describes a meeting of the Assembly, and how 

Evaeon, smart accomplished chap. 
With nothing on, as most of us supposed. 
But he himself insisted he was clothed — 
He made a popular democratic speech. 
Behold, says he, I am myself in want 
Of cash to save me ; yet I know the way 
To save the citizens, and save the state. 
Let every clothier give to all that ask 
Warm woollen robes, when first the sun turns back.* 
No more will pleurisy attend us then. 
Let such as own no bedclothes and no bed. 
After they've dined, seek out the furriers, there 
To sleep ; and whoso shuts his doors against them 
In wintry weather, shall be fined three blankets. 

Blepyros. Well said indeed ; and never man would dare 
To vote against him, had he added this : 
That all who deal in grain shall freely give 
Three quarts to every pauper, or be hanged. ^ 

But the great achievement at the Assembly, in which this 
democratic speech was delivered, was the transfer of every 
power in the state to the women. We need not dwell on the 
trick by which it was done, but consider at once the main 
features of the new feminine government, remembering at 
the same time that parody is nothing unless it parodies. 
Praxagora shall set forth her schemes herself (with the aid of 
Mr. B. B. Rogers 3)_ 

The rule which I dare to enact and declare, 
Is that all shall be equal, and equally share 
All wealth and enjoyments, nor longer endure 
That one should be rich, and another be poor. 
That one should have acres, far-stretching and wide, 
And another not even enough to provide 

1 The winter solstice, 21 December. 

2 Aristophanes, Eccles. 408-425. 
' Aristophanes, Eccles. 590 ff. 

19 



290 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Himself with a grave : that this at his call 

Should have hundreds of servants/ and that none at all. 

All this I intend to correct and amend : 

Now all of all blessings shall freely partake, 

One life and one system for all men I make. 

Blepyros. But how will you manage it ? 

Praxagora. First, I'll provide 

That the silver, and land, and whatever beside 
Each man shall possess, shall be common and free. 
One fund for the public ; then out of it we 
Will feed and maintain you, like housekeepers true, 
Dispensing, and sparing, and caring for you. 

Blepyros sees how land can be put into a common stock, but a 
man, he thinks, might conceal his money, silver currency and 
gold Persian darics. Well, he won't be allowed to. But if 
he does all the same ? It won't matter ; 

Now each will have all that a man can desire. 
Cakes, barley-loaves, chestnuts, abundant attire. 
Wine, garlands and fish : then why should he wish 
The wealth he has gotten by fraud to retain ? 

But how will all this bear on marriage, for instance ? 

All women and men will be common and free, 
No marriage or other restraint there will be. 

Blepyros sees difficulties, but Praxagora sweeps them aside 
with a magnificent inconsequence. 

No girl will of course be permitted to mate 
Except in accord with the rules of the State. . . . 

A nice democratic device, she says ; and, as a result, if no 
one knows who his father is. 

All youths will in common be sons of the old. 

Here we are reminded of Plato's Republic ; and the question 
rises as to which comes first in order of time, Praxagora's or 
Plato's. Some scholars hold that Aristophanes is parodying 
ideas of Plato, which he knew before the publication of the 
Republic. If the precedence is the other way, it makes Plato's 
idea the stranger. Could he seriously have meant it, with the 
1 Slaves, in the original. 



THE NEW AGE 291 

comedy before him ? Further advantages Praxagora has to 
unfold : there will be no lawsuits, when there is no private 
property. (That, thinks Blepyros, will hit a lot of people.) 
There will be no gambling ; and the law courts will be turned 
into dining-halls ; and free women shall be rid of the competi- 
tion of slave hetairai. And so the Chorus appeals to the judges 
for the prize for comedy — to the wise for the wisdom of the 
play, to those who love laughter for its fun, and to all for the 
oath's sake, seeing they have sworn to judge aright. 

The motive of the Plutus, the last play of Aristophanes, is 
again economic. The hero has always been virtuous and 
luckless, while temple- thieves, demagogues, sycophants, and 
rascals generally are rich ; so he goes to consult the god at 
Delphi as to whether his son would do better to turn knave. 
The oracle bids him take home the first man he meets, and it 
proves to be the blind god, Plutus. The proposal is made to 
get his eyes cured, so that he can see what he is doing and give 
prosperity to the deserving. Poverty appears in person on 
the scene, and carries on a long argument to show that all 
industry depends upon Wealth not being equally distributed, 
and that industry is the mainstay of comfort. She convinces 
nobody ; and the god is taken away to " incubate " in the 
temple of Asclepios, and he recovers his sight. The results 
that follow fill the rest of the play, which (like so many) ends 
with a series of episodes illustrative of the new situation. 
The last is the arrival of the priest of Zeus the Saviour ; he 
is starving, for no one needs to pray for wealth now. For our 
purposes the play is of less significance than its predecessor, 
with its new socialist commonwealth, its feminine govern- 
ment, and its abolition of marriage — parodies all of them of 
the naturalistic notions of the day. 

But the crowning comedy came not from the theatre but 
from the philosophic schools, and not quite at once. 

Towards the end of the Peloponnesian War there was in 
Athens a man called Antisthenes.^ He was said to be a bastard, 
born of a Thracian woman, and at that time most Thracian 
women in Athens were slaves. However, as he said, the 

^ In dealing with Antisthenes, I have drawn, of course, from Diogenes 
Laertius, vi., and found much help in E. Caird's Evolution of Theology 
in the Greek Philosophies, vol. ii., and Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. ii. 



292 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Mother of the Gods was a foreigner too, and Phrygian at that ; 
while, as for being earthborn Hke the Athenians, the snails and 
the locusts shared that high origin. He became a pupil of 
Gorgias of Leontini, and to some purpose ; for grammarians 
of later days reckoned him one of the masters of Attic prose. ^ 
Later on in life — for Plato calls him a " late learner,'* ^ and 
he had already pupils in rhetoric — he fell in with Socrates and 
came under his influence. The simplicity, the plain life, 
the independence and self-mastery of Socrates made the 
deepest impression on him, and he walked up to the city 
from the Peiraieus every day to hear him. The words of the 
teacher and his character were to him a call to emancipation 
from the false standards of the day — to return to Nature. 
He would examine life ; and he did, and his report upon it 
tended to immense simplification.^ He too became master 
of a school. *' What shall I need ? " asked a Pontic youth 
who wished to study with him. '' A little book — and sense ; 
a pencil — and sense ; a little tablet — and sense,'* he said. 
Xenophon draws him in his Symposium, and he is one of the 
striking figures there — with his sturdy sense, his shrewd and 
incisive criticism, and his speech blunt to rudeness. When the 
question goes round, *' On what do you plume yourself ? " 
he answers, *' On my wealth," and it proves that his wealth 
is the faculty of seeing how little one needs, of being able 
to go without things.* *' Better madness than pleasure — 
fiavelrjv fidWov rj '^o-Oetrjv,'' his biographer tells us he 
would say. '* If I caught Aphrodite, I would shoot her, for 
she has spoiled many beautiful and good women for us." ^ 

" Back to nature " and *' freedom from illusion " (arvtpLa) 
were his watchwords — a freedom which he held that Plato 
did not know. Virtue is sufficient for happiness, by itself, 
without any addition, unless it be the strength of Socrates ; — 
virtue is a matter of deeds, and needs no words ; and the 
wise man is sufficient to himself. He was an individualist, 

1 A love of assonance and antithesis is to be seen in his recorded 
sayings. 

^Flsito, Sophist, 2 $10. 

^ It may not be quite fanciful to compare Francis of Assisi and his 
** marriage to poverty." 

* Xen. Symp. 4, 34-44. 

5 Clement Alex. Strom, ii. 20, 107, 48 5 p. 



THE NEW AGE 293 

in logic and in life. He wrote a great deal ; in a political 
dialogue he ran down all the democratic leaders of Athens ; in 
his Archelaos his old teacher Gorgias ; in his Aspasia the sons 
of Pericles and Aspasia.^ He attacked Plato and the " ideas," 
for the one thing real was for him the individual. State and 
family seem to be improvements on nature, additions, con- 
ventions, mistakes ; — he avowed himself a " citizen of the 
world," Koa-fioTTokLTr]^. He was the founder of the Cynics, 
a school which in its way did a good deal for mankind. They 
were a challenge that could not be ignored — a provocation 
to Plato and Aristotle as much as to the vulgar new citizen 
with his big house and his big meals. Above all from them 
came a nobler school, who did more for mankind, who cap- 
tured the best of the Romans and exercised an influence on 
some of the greatest teachers of the Christian church — the 
Stoics. 

It was Diogenes of Sinope,^ the follower of Antisthenes, 
who carried his ideas to a further point, but, while he preached 
virtually the negation of all human life, tempered his Nihilism 
with a touch of comedy. There is an air of conscious ad- 
vertisement of himself and his views that pervades the many 
stories told of him — the tub, the lamp at midday, and the like. 
He was ready to talk with anybody ; he was brilliant, para- 
doxical, charming, unexpected, and invincibly cheerful. 
** He used every place for every purpose," we are told, and 
we are given details ; and one may surmise that some of the 
things he did were done simply to startle and to shock. '* So 
he spoke and so he acted, in very truth * re-minting the 
currency,' ^ never conceding to custom what he did to nature, 
claiming that he put the same stamp on life as did Herakles, 
and setting nothing before freedom. . . . Everything, he 
said, belonged to the gods ; the gods are friends to the wise ; 
all things are in common between friends ; therefore all 
belonged to the wise. . . . Good birth and glory and the 
like he derided, as mere trappings of wickedness ; the only 
real state was the cosmos. Women should be common, he 

^ Athenaeus, v. 220. 

^ Here I overstep a little the limits of our period. The source is 
again Diogenes Laertius. 

* vofiiaiia Trapaxapdrrav — a very famous phrase of Diogenes himself. 



294 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

said ; marriage he never named, but as one persuades or the 
other persuades. Children would be common to all. There 
was nothing out of the way in taking anything from a temple 
or eating the flesh of any animal ; nor was there anything 
impious in eating human flesh, as the customs of foreigners 
proved. . . . Music and geometry and astronomy he neglected, 
as useless and needless." 

Such a school could not fail to have an effect — an effect 
not lessened by the deliberate absurdities of Diogenes. A 
strong shock was given to old opinions ; individualism received 
a new and tremendous emphasis. Plutarch is credited with 
remarking that Alexander realized the Cynic ideal on its 
political side by the foundation of his world-empire. Diogenes 
was certainly a contributor to the making of the new world 
which Alexander brought about — a world where the city-state 
hardly counted, where there was neither Greek nor barbarian, 
where nations were lost and races fused, and the West married 
to the East, Europe to Asia. Once more, what was parody 
in the play of Aristophanes is serious thought with Antisthenes 
and his school, and it militates of set purpose against every 
tradition and every ideal of which the Greeks were conscious. 

Side by side with Cynicism, another great influence was 
working for the obscuration of the city-state. To study 
philosophy and rhetoric men forsook home and country. 
The intellectual interests prevailed, and men left the state 
on one side to follow what interested them more. The Greeks 
had always been wanderers, but wanderers with a passion for 
home ; now that passion was weakened. Rhetoric and 
philosophy began to prove themselves international forces 
working for the breakdown of barriers. Isocrates was an 
Athenian, proud of Athens. After the great Funeral Speech 
of Pericles stands his Panegyric. Athens had been the saviour 
of the weak in Greece, of Greece itself ; she had from of old 
fought the barbarian, she had driven back the Persian, and 
received the Empire of the Sea as her reward, given her by 
the Greeks at large. She had taught the Greek world the 
arts of peace, of government, of life. She had led the way 
in colonization. She had been a city of refuge, an emporium 
for the world, an age-long festival and reunion for mankind. 
'^ So far behind has our city left all others in thought and 



THE NEW AGE 295 

language, that her pupils are the teachers of" the world, and 
she has made the name of Greek seem no longer a badge of 
blood but of mind, and men are called Greeks more because 
they have a part in our culture than because they come of a 
common stock." How much Athens had meant to the 
world was shown when Sparta took her place and the Peace 
of Antalkidas was made — violence in the cities, the betrayal 
of the Greeks of Asia to the Persian, the triumph of 
Artaxerxes, and the humiliation of all Greece together. 

Isocrates cannot be accused of want of patriotism, but 
he too could learn from life. He saw how much better 
Evagoras of Cyprus had managed in his terrible struggle 
with Persia than either Athenian democracy or Spartan 
oligarchy ; and the lesson was not lost on him. He lived in 
Athens, and he slowly turned against the great Athenian 
nostrum, this equality which was not equal. ** There were 
two equalities," he wrote, ^ *' and of these one gave the same 
to all and the other what is fitting to each ; and they [of old] 
recognized which of the two is preferable. They rejected 
that equality that counts good and bad worthy of the same ; 
and they chose that equality which honours each according 
to his deserts. With that equality they lived in this city, 
not filling their magistracies by lot from all, but choosing for 
each task the best men and the most fit." It was the more 
truly democratic way ; but it has passed. And it comes 
to this, that neither Athens nor Sparta is equal to the task 
of saving the Greeks now from the troubles upon them ; 
Empire has in turn undone both of them — for heaven's sake 
let Athens at least be done with it ; and for the great crusade, 
for the overthrow of the power that overshadows and ruins 
Greece, for the relief of all Greek troubles, for reconciliation 
among the states, and for the colonization of the eastern 
world anew with fresh Greek cities — Isocrates turns to Philip 
of Macedon. It is not a failure of patriotism ; it is a recogni- 
tion, almost prophetic, of a new order of things, of a world 
where Greece shall do everything but govern, and do it better 
unencumbered by the fatal gift of empire. 2 

Of all critics of contemporary democracy the most im- 

* Areop. 21, 22 ; a document of the year 355 b.g. 
2 More upon all this in Chapter XII. 



296 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

pressive and significant is Plato.^ It does not come under 
our present purpose to attempt to discuss the greatest of 
Greek thinkers, nor even his ideal Republic. Great men and 
great books call for great treatment. It is not enough to 
say that Plato's ideal state is communistic and minutely 
regulated, that it virtually prolongs slavery and even extends 
it, — for most people in it seem slaves in mind and body ; they 
must mate and think and worship as directed,^ — that it abolishes 
marriage and the home, and prescribes the orphanage as the 
finest upbringing for children. Such criticism would put 
the Republic of Plato on a level with those of Praxagora and 
Diogenes — who also wrote a Republic of his own. Perhaps 
as often as not the great mind's contribution is to be found 
not in its ideas but in its outlook on life at large and its treat- 
ment of its own ideas and other men's — breadth of handling, 
insight, sympathy and stimulus. Here our concern is with 
Greek democracy, and if we go to Plato for his view upon it, 
we may find at last that he does not share to the very utmost 
the views of his characters. When Socrates criticizes Pericles 
because, as he hears, Pericles has made the Athenians idle 
and cowardly and talkative and so forth, the criticism is 
intended to stir up Callicles ; however much it is meant in 
fact, its design is to provoke. ^ So in the Republic some part 
of Plato's purpose may be by over-statement to set thought 
in motion. For his real feeling — so great a man has many 
real feelings. " My friend, I said, do not attack the multitude ; 
they will change their minds, if, not in an aggressive spirit, 
but gently and with the view of soothing them and removing 
their dislike of over-education, you show them your philoso- 
phers as they really are, and describe as you were just now 
doing their character and profession, and then mankind will 
see that he of whom you are speaking is not such as they 
supposed. . . . Who can be at enmity with one who loves 
them ? who that is himself gentle and free from envy will be 
jealous of one in whom there is no jealousy ? Nay, let me 

^ Dr. Adam held that '-Plato's whole account of democracy and 
the democratical man, in spite of manifest exaggerations, brings 
Athens nearer to us than almost any monument of ancient literature, 
Aristophanes alone excepted " ; on Rep. viii. 557A. 

^ See Chapter IV. p. 1 1 1. 



THE NEW AGE 297 

answer for you, that in a few this harsh temper may be found, 
but not in the majority of mankind. . . . And do you not 
also think, as I do, that the harsh feehng which the many 
entertain toward philosophy originates in the pretenders, 
who rush in uninvited, and are always abusing them and 
finding fault with them, who make persons instead of things 
the theme of their conversation ? and nothing can be more 
unbecoming in philosophers than this." ^ 

At the beginning of the Seventh Letter, Plato — or some 
imitator or compiler writing for him — describes his youth : 
how among the Thirty were kinsmen and acquaintances of his 
own ; and how, as was natural with a young man, he supposed 
they would mend national life and bring it in line with justice ; 
and how ** in a short time these men made the former constitu- 
tion look golden " ; and how he was repelled by their deeds ; 
how the Thirty fell and the Democracy came back, and, 
though many things were not quite to his mind, in the main 
there was moderation ; and then how the judicial murder of 
Socrates led him to feel the difficulty of political life. Whoever 
wrote the passage, it represents the experience. Plato was 
of aristocratic origin, and his heart was engaged with the 
Thirty and with Socrates, and what befell in Athens might 
well (in the phrase used by Wordsworth in describing the 
events of 1793) throw him out of the pale of love. 2 But there 
was much, there always will be much, in democracy to shock or 
disquiet a thoughtful spectator — too much impulse, change of 
mind, headlong fickleness, too much of the spur of the moment. ^ 
Pericles had glorified the Athenian amateur in his Funeral 
Speech — his readiness, his adaptability, his gay capacity for 
every phase of life. Plato finds in Athenian democracy a 
darker strain — it is essentially absence of principle made into 
a principle.* But, as the Greek orator says, there is nothing 
like hearing the man himself. ^ 

Democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered 

1 Rep. vi. 499D-500A (Jowett), 2 pyelude, xi. 176. 

' Paraphrasing Polybius, vi. 56. 

* Nettleship, Lectures on Plato's Republic, p. 310. See also the 
interesting chapter on Plato in Mr. Livingstone's Greek Genius. 

^ What follows comes from Rep. viii., especially pp. 557, 558, 
562-565. I have compressed, and omitted the interlocutor with his 
" Certainly " and " Yes," and used Jowett's translation. 



298 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while 
the rest they admit on equal terms to citizenship and magis- 
tracies ; and as a rule their magistrates are elected by lot. 
Now what is their manner of life, and what sort of a government 
will they have ? For man and constitution will resemble 
each other, and both be democratic. They will be free ; the 
city will be full of freedom and frank speech, and full of liberty 
to do whatever one pleases. So there will be in it the greatest 
variety of human natures ; and, it would follow, it ought to be 
the most beautiful of all states — like an embroidered robe 
made gay with every kind of flower. This liberty to do what- 
ever one chooses will mean a complete assortment of con- 
stitutions ; anyone who (like ourselves) wants to found a 
state, has only to go to a democratically governed city, and there 
he will find a whole bazar (iravroTrdoXcov) full of constitu- 
tions, where he can pick what he pleases and have patterns 
enough. There will be no necessity for you to rule or to hold 
office in this state — no, not even if you are fit for it ; no 
necessity for you to be ruled, if you don't want to ; nor to go 
to war, when your fellow-citizens go to war ; nor to be at peace 
when the rest are — unless, of course, you feel like it ; even if 
some law forbids you to be a magistrate or a dicast, that is 
no reason for your not being either, if you have the fancy ; — 
really, isn't such a way of life divinely pleasant for the moment ? 
Then think of Democracy's forbearance, — there is nothing 
small about her, — her contempt for all our fine talk about the 
special training of the ruler ; no matter what a man's equip- 
ment may be, if only he says he is a friend of the many ! It 
will be a charming commonwealth, anarchic and polychrome, 
with equality for all, equal and unequal, whatever they are. 

And now for the Democratic man and his mind. His 
mind will be swept clear of modesty, which would be called 
silliness, of temperance, — mere unmanliness ! — of moderation, 
as being boorish and illiberal ; these are oligarchic elements in 
his nature, and they are expelled by a rabble of useless appe- 
tites. " And when they have emptied and swept clean the 
soul of him who is now in their power and who is being 
initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring 
back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and 
impudence in bright array, having garlands on their heads, 



THE NEW AGE 299 

and a great company with them, hymning their praises, and 
calHng them by sweet names." He beHeves in a true de- 
mocracy of incHnations ; they are all alike and must be 
equally honoured. So he plunges through life from one thing 
to another — drink, music, water-drinking, gymnastics, phil- 
osophy, politics, war — 

Myself will to my darling be 
Both law and impulse — 

a jolly life, a generous life, motley and manifold — an epitome of 
all sorts of things, real happiness ! 

Such is the progress of Democracy. She drinks too deep 
of the strong wine of freedom, and then, if her rulers will 
not give her more still — they are cursed oligarchs. The 
same spirit pervades the whole state — the home, the school- 
room, the very stables — master and pupil, the old man and the 
young so pleasant and witty together, the sexes of course 
equally free, and the bought slave as good as his buyer or her 
buyer. It does not even stop there — the bitch is as good as her 
mistress (as the proverb says), and the horses and the donkeys 
march the streets with a very free spirit and a very dignified 
gait, and you will please make way for them. Everything 
ready to burst with liberty. 

So this is Democracy drawn for us by a man of genius 
in '' one of the most royal and magnificent pieces of writing 
in the whole range of literature, whether ancient or modern " ^ 
— " a land of Hedonism, peopled by Anarchy and Wayward- 
ness, and darkened by the shadow of the Tyranny to which at 
last it must succumb." 2 Is it a true picture ? 

First of ail, there is a reply on the philosophic side, the 
classical example of which is Milton's Areopagitica. We must 
have freedom if we are to grow. Out of the disorder and the 
challenge of Athenian democracy grew Plato. In Plato's 
Republic, it has been pointed out, Socrates' shrift would have 
been short ; there is to be little intercourse there with men 
of other minds, little travel, '' and when they come home, 
they will tell the young that the customs and constitutions of 
other men are inferior to ours" — like Englishmen who visit 
America and the Colonies. 

^ So Adam, on Plato, Rep. 559D. ^ Adam on 557D. 



300 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

We can feel for ourselves how Greece began to decline when 
she took to thinking she had nothing to learn from the bar- 
barian ; how the later Greeks fall below the people of Hero- 
dotus ; and how the men stand out who, like Xenophon and 
Alexander, consorted with the foreigner and learnt his mind 
and respected him and grew by it. Plato's ideal state would 
have been more stifling than the later Athens, or any other 
known example of insular life. A state or a constitution may 
be judged from many points of view, but it is at least arguable 
that that state is best which offers the most varied stimulus 
to each citizen to think, to explore, to be to the utmost. If 
this is true, then there is something more to be said for Athens 
than Plato allows in this " most royal and magnificent " of 
travesties. 

But in so saying we move on to a further point. Does 
Athens in fact merit this brilliant description, does she deserve 
the censure ? It is quite clear from the history of our period, 
and, still more, of the generations that follow, that Democracy 
as conceived by the Athenians had played its part in the world, 
and that it was becoming obsolete. It was not so much that 
Democracy itself was outworn, but that so far no system 
had been successfully thought out for the application of 
Democratic principles to any state much larger than an ordinary 
Greek town.^ The hour had come when all was to depend on 
national powers of larger dimensions, and for them no scheme 
had yet been achieved that would make Democracy possible. 
In world-politics, therefore. Democracy was to recede. But if 
we study Athens even in this century when she is falling into 
the background, do we find that Plato's censures apply to her ? 
There is, of course, endless variety of mind and thought in 
Athens — it is a bazar of opinion, outlook, principle, and every- 
thing. Yet government is stable, and life and property are 
secure. If we except, as we have to except, the government 
of subject provinces, which was now no part of the duties of 
the Athenian people, every other function of government is 
managed better than in any other state of the day of which 
we have any knowledge. Athens is still the pleasantest place 
in the world, and her citizens, despite all their genius for 
variety, as reasonable and as obedient to law as those of any 
1 The Achaean League was not really very democratic. 



THE NEW AGE 301 

other state. She offers the surest and the happiest home for 
genius still. Human life was still possible in Athens, as it 
could not have been possible in a land of Hedonism, peopled 
by Anarchy and Waywardness — human life, too, that was 
more truly and fully human than anywhere else. Greece 
had still abundance of life — life enough to quicken the nearer 
East ; to learn of Persia, of Syria, and of Egypt ; to make all 
that imperishable contribution to mankind which is summed up 
in the history of Hellenism and of Constantinople ; and Athens 
was still the very heart of all Greek life. 

** There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." 



•tM 



CHAPTER X 
THE HOUSE OF PASION 



SOMEWHERE about the year 395 a young man arrived 
in Athens from the Black Sea. He had always been 
hearing about Greece, above all (as he politely tells the 
Athenians) about Athens, and he had conceived very naturally 
a young man's desire to travel. So his father gave him some 
considerable sum of money, and sent him off in charge of two 
shiploads of wheat *' to trade and to see the world " — Kara 
ifiiroplav xal /cara decop'iav. 

He reached Athens at a very interesting moment. Great 
movements were in the air. It looked as if at last, under the 
stimulus of Pharnabazos the satrap of Daskyleion and Conon 
the Athenian exile, the King of Persia was really meaning 
to do something with the fleet which had been so long building 
in the Eastern Mediterranean. Athenian embassies had from 
time to time been sent to Susa to make it clear to the King 
that it was neither just nor expedient that one city, viz. 
Sparta, should be mistress of the Greeks ; ^ though the am- 
bassadors did not always reach Susa, for on one occasion at 
least they were caught by a Spartan admiral, sent to Sparta, 
and there put to death. ^ But by now apparently an 
ambassador had come from Asia. A Rhodian, by name Timo- 
crates, had been sent by the satrap Tithraustes, with a sub- 
stantial guarantee of Persian intentions. With silver to 
the value of fifty gold talents he had been moving from one 
city to another, where there was ill-will to Sparta ; he had seen 
the leading statesmen ; and the result of his mission was a new 
confidence that Persia was in earnest and that it would be safe 
to take steps long contemplated. For the moment Sparta was 
* Isocrates, de Pace, 68. ^ Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 2, i. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 303 

still supreme, but she was not to be so for very long. The 
battle of Haliartos in the autumn of 395 was made a decisive 
one by the death of Lysander under the city wall and the extor- 
tion of a truce from King Pausanias for the recovery of his body. 
The moving spirit of Sparta was gone — the mind and character 
that had finished for her the long Peloponnesian War with an 
unequalled triumph and had won her an undreamed-of empire. 
The Spartans sent to Asia to recall King Agesilaos, and before 
he reached the borders of Boeotia the battle of Cnidos had been 
fought and won by Conon in his capacity of Persian admiral, 
and the Spartan sea-power was ended (August 395 ).i 

For the son of Sopaios — in the absence of his own name 
we have to use his father's — as for all others who travelled 
by sea for trade and to see the world, all these international 
relations were supremely relevant. But for our present 
purpose high policy and great armaments must be mere back- 
ground, felt but not emphasized. He does not, like other 
Pontic youths in Athens, bring us among the philosophers. ^ 
Our interest is rather in the world of commerce and finance in 
which the young man moved, and in the people we meet there — 
in their personalities as far as we can distinguish them, in their 
concerns and outlooks, and at last in the fortunes of one house- 
hold — a family group outstanding and significant. 

" My father," says the young man, " is Sopaios, whom 
all who sail to the Pontos know to be so intimately associated 
with Satyros, that he rules a great deal of his country and is in 
charge of all his powers." Satyros, as he says, bore a very 
well-known name — so familiar that he needs explain no more 
to an Athenian audience. 

At the entrance to the Sea of Azov, on or very near the site 
of the modern town of Kertsch, stood the city of Panticapaeum, 
or Bosporos, as it was often called. ^ A Milesian settlement, and 

^ The battle is dated by the fact that Agesilaos heard the news of 
it on the Boeotian frontier on 14 August (eclipse of the sun). 

2 See Diogenes Laertius, vi. i , for several of them. One of them 
promised Antisthenes fine things, " when his ship of dried fish should 
arrive." Diogenes, the Cynic, also came from Pontus, the son of a 
banker at Sinope. 

2 What follows comes from Strabo (cc. 309-3 11) in the main. 
Polybius, iv. 38-42, has a long discussion as to the effects of the great 
rivers and their silt in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. 



304 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP ^ 

built all over a hill twenty stades round, it had a harbour for 
thirty ships. Between it and Theodosia (still so called) lay 
good wheat lands, some five hundred and thirty stades in 
length, dotted with villages, and also a town and harbour 
called Nymphaion. Theodosia, another Milesian settlement, 
could accommodate a hundred ships, and commanded a further 
plain of good land. The region was ruled by a dynasty, which 
came into possession of it about 438 B.C., and held it down 
to the days of the great Mithradates — *' rulers '* they were 
called in formal documents, " tyrants " or " dynasts " in 
common speech, but most of them were admittedly wise and 
moderate sovereigns. Satyros was the fourth of his house, 
it appears, and succeeded his predecessor in 407. At this time 
it seems likely that Athens held Nymphaion, for Aeschines 
says that the maternal grandfather of Demosthenes, Gylon by 
name, an exile under impeachment, betrayed it to " the 
tyrants " and received a reward in land, " the so-called Kepoi,'* 
and a Scythian wife, whose daughter afterwards bore Demos- 
thenes, " Scythian on his mother's side, a barbarian, who 
speaks Greek, but whose villainy is not native to us.*' ^ As 
Satyros was definitely in friendly relations with Athens " before 
the disaster in the Hellespont/* ^ ^^(j remained so afterwards,^ 
and as all chance of holding foreign dependencies was swept 
away from Athens by that event, the betrayal of Nymphaeum 
to the friendly neighbour was probably not an unpatriotic act. * 

From of old the Pontic wheat trade had been of the highest 
importance. Herodotus tells us of Scythians somewhere in 
the neighbourhood of the Borysthenes (the Dnieper) " who till 
the ground and sow corn not for food but to sell,'* and he 
describes how Xerxes at Abydos saw wheat-ships from Pontus 
sailing through the Hellespont on their way to Aegina and the 
Peloponnesos.^ Athens, above all peoples, lived upon im- 
ported wheat, as Demosthenes more than once points out.® 
Socrates bears witness to the energy and spirit of the corn 
trade : " the dealers are lovers of wheat ; for, you know, 

1 Aeschines, c. Ctesiph. § 172. 

2 Cf. Lysias, Mantith. § 4. * Isocrates, Trapez. § 57. 
* Schaefer, Dem. u. seine Zeit (ed. i), i. 237 f. 
^ Herodotus, iv. 17, and vii. 147. 

^•Demosthenes, Lept. $1 ; de Cor. 87. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 305 

through their extraordinary love of wheat, wherever they hear 
it is most abundant, they go saiHng off for it — over the Aegaean, 
across the Euxine, across the SiciHan Sea. And then, when they 
have got as much as ever they can, they bring it over the sea — 
yes, and keep it with them on the ship they are saiHng on 
themselves. And when they need money, they will not unload 
it at haphazard, in any place wherever they may happen to be, 
but wherever they hear it stands highest [rLfidaOai, a play on 
*' honour " and " price "], wherever men set most store by it, 
they bring it and hand it over to these people. Your father 
was just as fond of agriculture. You're joking, Socrates, said 
Ischomachus." ^ It was no joke. King Agis, during the 
Peloponnesian War, looked from Deceleia and saw wheat-ships 
in great numbers running into the Peiraieus, and reahzed that 
it was useless to ravage the land if food came from the sea, and 
sent Clearchus off to Byzantium. ^ Five years later when 
Lysander captured the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont, the 
wheat-ships came no more, and Athens fell. Fifty years 
later Philip again saw that to deal with Athens he must 
hold Byzantium. ^ Still later * Polybius emphasizes the import- 
ance of Byzantium — " by sea it so completely commands the 
entrance to the Pontus that no merchant can sail in or out 
against its will. The Pontus is rich in many things which the 
rest of the world requires for the support of life . . . those 
commodities which are the first necessities of existence, viz. 
cattle and slaves, are confessedly supplied to us by the districts 
round the Pontus in greater quantity and better quality than 
from elsewhere ; and for luxuries, they supply us with honey, 
wax, and salt-fish in great abundance ; while of the commodities 
that abound with us, they take oil and every kind of wine. As 
to corn, there is interchange, in good seasons they export it, 
sometimes they import it.'' ^ 

Miletus had once ruled the trade in the Crimean region, but 
she had fallen to the Persian, and her heir was Athens. When 
one reflects that oil stood for the Greeks in the place held 
among us by butter, soap, and electric light, and that the olive 
does not grow in Southern Russia, the exchange of grain for 

1 Xen. Oecon. 20, 28. 2 Hellenica, i. i, 35, 36. 

3 Demosthenes, de Cor. 87. * About 150 B.C. 

5 Polybius, iv. 38. 
20 



3o6 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

wine and oil grows more significant ; and we may remember, 
with a new pleasure in it, the corner which the philosopher 
Thales is said to have made one good year in oil presses.^ 
Solon had turned Athenian attention to the commercial import- 
ance of the olive, and Peisistratos to that of wine ; and archae- 
ologists tell us of the widely found remains of Greek wine 
jars of the sixth and fifth century all over the Mediter- 
ranean. The trade between Pontus and Greece was very 
great, concerned as it was with the foundations of life. 
Grain was raised on the southern shore ; round Calpe, for 
instance, we saw how Xenophon noted a good soil that 
produced barley, wheat, and other cereals — *' everything 
except olives.'* ^ We learn, however, from Theophrastus 
that the corn grown on the northern shore, though inferior 
in quality to that of the southern, bore exportation better 
and could be kept for a longer time.^ 

All through the fourth century the friendliest relations were 
maintained by Athens with the dynasts of Bosporos. Com- 
pliments, immunities, statues — every kind of honour was paid 
to them ; and they deserved their honours. For it appears 
that the export duty of one-thirtieth levied on exported wheat 
at their ports Leucon, the successor of Satyros, remitted to 
Athenian traders * — a remission which must, as Grote says, 
have thrown into Athenian hands almost the whole exporting 
trade. The son of Sopaios, when he comes before the Athenian 
court, makes the most of Athenian privileges at Bosporos— 
** it is fit," he says, " that you should think of Satyros and of 
my father, who always make more account of you than of the 
rest of the Greeks, and many a time before now have from the 
scarcity of wheat sent the ships of the other traders away 
empty and given you freedom to export it ; yes, and in private 
contracts, of which they are judges, you get not merely what is 
fair and right, but more than that." 

The young Bosporan then got his two ships loaded with 
wheat and set sail. Neither he nor his advocate thought about 

^ Cf. Chapter II. p. 41. See the address of Mr. J. L. Myres on 
-- The Geographical Aspect of Greek Colonization " in the Proceedings 
of the Classical Association, 191 1. 

2 Anab. vi. 4, 6 ; and vi. 6, i. 

3 Theophrastus, H.P, viii. 4, 5. * Demosthenes, Lept. 31. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 307 

posterity, and they have left us no account of the voyage. A 
hint escapes when another transaction is mentioned. It is 
alleged that he borrowed money of a certain Stratocles, and he 
explains that he did so to draw as much as he could of his 
property from home ; Stratocles was to pay down 300 staters 
in gold and draw on Sopaioswhen he reached Bosporos; and the 
object was to avoid risk, " especially as the Spartans were at 
that time rulers of the sea." ^ For, as Isocrates tells us, speak- 
ing more particularly of the years between 386 and 380, under 
Spartan rule '* the seas are infested with pirates." ^ We come 
on various instances, in the Greek speeches that survive for us, 
of men being captured by pirates, and held to ransom, or dying 
of their wounds. Curiously enough, in attacking the corn- 
dealers, Lysias speaks of these risks. The dealers '' are so glad 
to see your disasters, that they are the first to hear of them from 
others or they make them up themselves — that the ships in the 
Pontus are wrecked, or taken by the Spartans just as they set sail, 
or that the marts are closed, or the treaty is to be renounced 
... so that sometimes even in time of peace we are besieged 
by them." ^ The son of Sopaios, however, and his ships escaped 
all these perils, passed Byzantium and the Hellespont, picked 
up the three islands and Euboea, then Sunium ; and then, if we 
may imagine it to be morning and borrow a description from 
the year 387, we can picture him amid " fishing-smacks and 
ferries full of men from the islands," and'* merchant- vessels 
laden some with wheat and others with merchandise "* sailing 
down into the very centre of the world's commerce, the 
Peiraieus. 

It might be possible to conjecture some oi his adventures 
there — his engagements with the Pentecostologoi and other 
harbour officials, and then with the dealers, metics mostly, ^ 
who bought his wheat in such lots and parcels as the law 
allowed, if they were being watched, or, otherwise, as they 
could. It is easy to suppose him impressed with the variety 
and the business of the place — ships in and out every day, 
loading and unloading every kind of cargo. Two things 

^ Isocrates, Trapez. 35, 36. 2 isocrates, Paneg. 115. 

3 Lysias, xxii. 14 — Wilamowitz dates the speech 386. 

* Xen. Hellenica, v. i, 23. 

* Cf. Lysias, xxii. 5 ; and [Dem.] xxxiv. 



3o8 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

appear to stand out, viz., that a very large part of the carrying 
trade of Greece was in the hands of Athenian citizens or metics, 
and that the Peiraieus, in spite of wars, though empires fell 
and war fleets were sunk, was and remained the great place 
of exchange for the world's business. A moment's reflection 
on such things as the place once held in Europe by the great 
fairs, the difference made in commerce by railways ^ and 
commercial travellers and the swift transit of goods in sample 
and in bulk, and the large percentage of British imports that 
come in to go out again very quickly, will suggest the signifi- 
cance of a place to which all ships came. The Athenian oligarch, 
thirty years before, had spoken of the gathering of imports 
from all the world, from Sicily to Pontus and Egypt, and we 
have seen the list the comic poet made of them in 428. ^ Corinth 
had learnt to the full the meaning of Hippias' words, that a 
free Athens would be her undoing. What is more, they that 
take the sword perish with the sword, and thirty years of war 
had injured Corinth even if Sparta came out mistress. In 
these very years (393 or 392) Corinth was united with Argos 
— amalgamated in some way, very galling to the national 
feeling of a section of the community, whose views Xenophon 
represents in vigorous language. ^ Athens, as Isocrates boasts,* 
stood open, a hospitable city for the prosperous and the un- 
fortunate, the most delightful of resorts for the one, and for 
the other the safest of refuges ; " and furthermore as no people 
has a land wholly self-sufficient, but some things fall short 
of what is needed, and of others more than enough is pro- 
duced, and there rose great difficulty as to where to send 
the over-produce or to make good the deficiency, she came 
to their aid in these difficulties too. For she made the 
Peiraieus a mart (i/iiropLov) in the very midst of Greece, 
so that the commodities which it is hard to gather from 
the rest of mankind, one thing from this people and 

1 Railways make and unmake ports. London, thanks to railways, 
has killed a good many of her rivals of earlier days. Of. Sir Douglas 
Owen, Ocean Trade and Shipping, p. 9. 

2 Hermippos, in Chapter II. p. 45. 

3 See Chapter XII. p. 391. Xen. Hellenica, iv. 4, 6. The eventual 
rival of Athens for Mediterranean trade was Rhodes, and Rhodes was 
scarcely twenty years old, as a single united city. 

* Isocrates, Paneg. 41, 42. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 309 

another elsewhere, it is easy to obtain one and all from 
her/' 1 

The same point is made by the author of the remarkable 
little tract on Revenues {iropoi), which belongs to the first 
half of the fourth century — perhaps, though this is doubtful, 
from the pen of Xenophon. One might reasonably think 
Athens the very centre of Greece and of all the world ; whoever 
would go from one extreme end of Greece to the other must 
pass by Athens or sail by her (i, 6).^ Athens is the pleasantest 
and most profitable city in the world for trade (3, i) ; her 
haven is easily made whatever wind blows (i, 7), and it is 
convenient when you get there (3, i). In most places when a 
ship discharges she has to wait till she can get a return freight, 
for their local currencies are not serviceable elsewhere ; but 
in Athens, there are return freights of every kind to be had — 
everything that man needs, in short — and moreover her cur- 
rency is good everywhere, so the ship can unload and be off 
at once with cargo or cash, as the merchant pleases (3, 2).^ 

Athens ought, the writer holds, to pay special attention to 
her metics, to abolish all unprofitable limitations and disquali- 
fications put on them, to do honour to traders and ship-captains, 
whose ships or wares are remarkable, and to build (virtually) 
hotels for them near the docks, and exchanges for their business 
in suitable places, which might at once be ornamental and 
useful. For it is clear to him that the more people frequent 
the place and settle, the more v/ill be the imports and exports, 

^ See Aristotle, Pol. vii. 6, 4, 1327a, on a city's needs of exports and 
imports for herself ; *' those who make themselves a market for the 
world only do so for the sake of revenue." 

2 Strabo, c. 286, claims this centrality in a later day for Italy ; the 
civilization of Gaul and Spain shifted the world's commercial centre 
Westward, as the rise of the West Indies and America did it again in 
the sixteenth century. 

^ Cf . Sir Douglas Owen, Ocean Trade and Shipping, p. 1 1 : 
" Glasgow, like Liverpool, is in a favoured position among the great 
cargo ports — as compared, for example, with London — owing to 
the volume of her export trade ; for a port which can supply an un- 
laden ship with an outward cargo, instead of sending her away in 
ballast to seek elsewhere, is a port which appeals to owners." On the 
previous page he shows how London, on the other hand, is what 
Isocrates would call the cfXTropiou for the tea trade, and supplies Glasgow 
and Liverpool with their tea. 



310 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and with them pubHc revenues and expenditure — blessings for 
everybody. Metics might be reHeved from serving in the 
army with citizens, partly because they would prefer the 
release, and partly — a touch of Greek feeling and a curious 
revelation of how mixed the population was growing — " it 
would be better if the citizens served with one another, and 
did not have ranked with them, as now, Lydians and Phrygians 
and S^^rians and all sorts of barbarians ; for such are many of 
the metics " (2, 3). ** Athens above all cities in the world is 
that which in the nature of things grows by peace ; if she 
were at peace, who would not need her, beginning with ship- 
captains and merchants ? " ^ — and he mentions people who 
are well supplied with grain, wine, sheep, financiers, craftsmen, 
sophists, philosophers, and poets (5, 2, 3). And this brings 
us back to the boast of Isocrates that Athens is the mistress 
who has taught the teachers of all the world, till '' Greek " 
is now a term that connotes culture as much as race. 2 A later 
age was to see almost every philosopher of note leave his 
native place and make Athens his home. One of the greatest 
of them came, it was said, in charge of a cargo of purple — the 
Phoenician Cypriot Zeno.^ 

A community, that draws to itself the commerce and the 
culture of all the world, will soon feel special needs and develop 
specialized industries and professions to meet them. The 
one that at present most concerns us is banking. The bankers 
began as money-changers — an expert business in itself, as we 
can realize, when we remember that there were five main 
standards in currency among the Greek states and endless 
local' varieties, some, as we have seen, unnegotiable a few 
miles away from the mints.* Sparta still had iron *' spits " — 
she had plenty of the gold once forbidden and was quite eager 
for more, though she did not coin it. At the other end of the 
scale at Bosporos, where gold was cheap and came freely from 
Colchis and Armenia, gold staters were struck on a high 

1 On the other hand, Aristotle {Pol. vii. 6, i, 1327a) discusses a 
question of old standing : Is a city benefited in the direction of good 
order by communication with the sea, by a crowd of merchants coming 
and going ? 

2 Paneg. 43. 

3 Cf. E. Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, p. 15. Diogenes Laertius, vii. 
* G. F. Hill, Manual of Greek and Roman Coins, pp. 33-42. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 311 

standard.^ *' Many cities," again, as Demosthenes says, 
** use money quite openly debased with brass and lead ; '* 2 
and we learn that the tyrant Dionysius, like Polycrates before 
him, and like Napoleon after him with forged Russian bank- 
notes, tried this discreditable device. ^ One of the difficulties, 
with which Athens had to cope in her days of Empire, was 
the restriction of the liberty of free coinage among her subjects. 
The Persian Empire, as we have seen, had its own currency ; 
the daric went everywhere. But there were also Persian 
varieties. Pharnabazos, we learn, about this time was issuing 
staters with a fine portrait of himself and his name in Greek 
characters, perhaps from the mint of Cyzicos.* This city's 
own gold staters were one of the best known and most widely 
accepted currencies. 

The money-changers were a necessity, and their tables 
stood about the market — good centres, it appears, for idlers 
and other students of human nature. Socrates on trial will 
use, he says, the same sort of language " which I have been 
accustomed to speak in the market at the tables, where many 
of you have heard me." ^ The Man of Petty Ambition, who, 
according to Theophrastus,^ has his hair cut very frequently 
and keeps his teeth white, and affects other forms of dandyism, 
frequents the tables of the money-changers in the market-place, 
and buys things on commission for friends abroad — pickled 
olives to go to Byzantium, and Laconian hounds for Cyzicos. 
By and by the money-changers began to attract to themselves 
a business which the temples had so far had ' — they began to 
take money and other things on deposit ; and this enabled 
them to pursue money-lending on a larger scale and a broader 
basis. Banking began in earnest, with all the apparatus of 
elaborately kept books, even down to something very like 
letters of credit.^ It was not everybody who took in the system 

1 G. F. Hill, Manvial, p. ^2>' ^ Demosthenes, Timocr. 214. 

3 Aristotle, Econ. ii. 2, 20, 1349a ; Herodotus, iii. 56; and G. F. 
Hill, Manual, pp. 16, 17. 

* See Chapter VII. p. 222 ; G. F. Hill, p. 96. 
s Plato, Apol. 17c. 

* Theophrastus, Characters, 7. 

' Xenophon left his share of the loot of the Anabasis in the temple 
of Artemis at Ephesus {A nab. v. 3, 6). 

® The desire to avoid shipping of money (Isocrates, Trapez. 36). 



312 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

at a flash ; for, when Apollodorus prosecuted Timotheos, 
he took care to explain to the court how it was that he could 
know so exactly the dates and details of the transactions 
he was to unfold ; how bankers keep memoranda of the sums 
they pay out and enter such items as for what this or that is 
paid, and to whom and on whose account, so that they may 
know what is drawn and what deposited when accounts are 
made up.^ The explanation, and the need for it, are interest- 
ing. Some people knew all about it quite well — Theophrastus' 
Boastful Man will stand in the Deigma (a bazar in the Peiraieus) 
talking to foreigners of the great sums which he has at sea ; 
he will discourse of the vastness of his money-lending business 
and the extent of his personal gains and losses ; and, while 
thus drawing the long-bow, will send his boy to the bank, 
where he has a drachma to his credit. ^ 

II 

The son of Sopaios came to Athens, as we have seen, with 
a good deal of money and two cargoes of wheat. It was the 
natural thing for him at once to look out a banker, and he says 
that Pythodorus, the son of Phoenix, ^ recommended Pasion 
to him, " so I used his bank. ' ' The bank was an old-established 
one, as banks went, and was very widely known throughout 
the commercial world. It was in the Peiraieus, as one would 
expect, and it had been the property of two men, Antisthenes 
and Archestratos, who had retired, though Archestratos 
still lived and lent his successor in the business the guarantee 
of his name, as we shall see. The successor had been, as very 
usually was the case, a servant of the bank — in plain words, a 
slave — who had given good proof that he was honest and 
capable. " And," adds Demosthenes,* " in the commercial 
world and the money market, that a man should have a reputa- 
tion for business faculties and should at the same time be 
honest is considered a very remarkable thing.'* Pasion had, 

^ [Dem.] Timoth. 5. ^ Theophrastus, Characters, 6. 

3 Isocrates, Trapez. 4. Pythodorus may have been a Phoenician 
and not the son of Phoenix. His own Greek name does not prove him 
a Greek. xPW^^'- is the technical term for being a cHent of a bank. 

* Demosthenes, pro Phorm. 44. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 313 

in the phrase of the day, presided at the table and managed * — 
he had been chief clerk, slave as he was. For, as will appear, 
a banker was much more master of his own business when his 
employes were his slaves. If litigation arose, the Athenian 
laws of evidence, with their markedly different treatment of 
slave and free, sometimes left a loophole for a speedy manu- 
mission, which might save the bank-clerk from torture and his 
employer from loss, while for business purposes their relations 
would be very little changed. A good business man, even if 
he were a slave, was a valuable and important person ; 2 and 
we can well believe that even before Pasion was manumitted 
he was a well-known figure in commercial circles, whose 
features and whose mind would be familiar to merchants and 
sea-captains all over the Greek world. What is more, his 
knowledge of these men and his gift for divining or knowing 
their characters and financial stability were among the most 
valuable assets of the bank. The man was trusted far and 
wide, at once for his judgment and his honesty ; he was set free 
in due course, and at last succeeded his masters as banker him- 
self. Politically he ranked with the me tics as a resident alien. 
So to Pasion the son of Sopaios went and used his bank ; 
and his transactions, he tells us, were on a large scale. He 
managed to get into difficulties with the state in the matter of 
a merchant vessel, on which he had lent a good deal of money ; 
for it was denounced as belonging to a Delian, and therefore 
liable to confiscation as the property of an alien enemy in a time 
of war. He was foolish enough to try to have the ship launched 
and away, and then found himself in imminent risk of being 
put to death without trial. An old friend of his father's, 
whom he called in, refused assistance ; but Pasion helped 
him out and produced Archestratos to be his surety in a sum 
of seven talents. From the fact that he mentions the matter 
before an Athenian court, we may deduce that the case was 
settled in his favour, but we may draw other inferences from 
the episode than those he wishes. ^ Against this we can set a 

^ [Dem.] Steph. A. 33, KaBrjfxevov icai biocKovvTa eVi rfj rpaire^r} ; and 
Timoth. 17, 6 iiriKaBrjyiivos iirX rfj rpaTreCj] ; and Isocrates, Trapez. 12. 

2 The manager of the elder Demosthenes' sword-factory was a 
freedman (Demosthenes, Aphobos, A. 19). 

* Isocrates, Trapez. 42, 43 ; Meier-Schomann, Der Attische Process, 



314 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

small service rendered by him, he says, to Pasion.^ Eisphora 
was required — the special war-tax levied on property and paid 
by citizen and me tic alike — and epigrapheis, who seem to 
have been assessment commissioners, not exactly state 
officials, were appointed. The son of Sopaios says he was 
one of them, and interceded with his colleagues on behalf 
of Pasion. The occasion must have been when Athens in 
autumn 395, though still without walls, made her bold alliance 
with Thebes and sent her contingent to Haliartos, or when next 
year she sent her troops to take part in the unhappy battle of 
Corinth. 2 Both episodes are mentioned by the son of Sopaios 
to prove that he really was possessed of large sums,^ and was 
therefore worth robbing ; and this brings us at once to his 
quarrel with Pasion. What follows is merely the Bosporan's 
narrative as set out for him by Isocrates, who had lost all his 
property in the Peloponnesian War and was at present writing 
speeches for litigants.* 

He begins by explaining to the court that it is his name and 
credit that are at stake, for, great as the sum in dispute is, he 
has plenty of property beside it. He further warns the court 
that a case against a banker is always a difficult one, for bank- 
ing transactions are made without witnesses, and the great 
bankers have great influence, and their profession seems to 
guarantee their honesty. Then he sets about telling his tale, 
and explains how he came from the Pontus and began to deal 
with Pasion. Some time later, he continues, there was a 
difficulty with Satyros ; Sopaios was denounced to him as 
plotting a revolution, and his son in Athens as consorting with 
Bosporan exiles, who in the nature of things were available 
for any conspiracy of the kind. Satyros at once arrested 
Sopaios, and sent word to his subjects resident in Athens to 
seize what property the son of Sopaios might have and send 
himself home at once a prisoner. — We may remark that the 
sending of such orders to Athens shows how secure Satyros 
felt his relations with the Athenians to be. — The son of Sopaios 
in this moment of difficulty turned to his banker, in whom he 

p. 298. The independence of Delos at this time is confirmed by an 
inscription of 403 (see Hicks and Hill, Greek Hist. Inscr., No. 2>^). 

1 Isocrates, Trapez. 41. ^ Xen. Hellenica, iii. ^, 16 ; iv. 2, 10-23. 

• Isocrates, Trapez. 41. * Isocrates, 15, Antidosis, 161. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 315 

had implicit trust ; and they devised a plan. Such property 
as was too conspicuous to be concealed, was handed over to 
the agents of Satyros, while the Bosporan denied that anything 
stood to his credit in Pasion's books, and alleged that, on the 
contrary, he owed money to Pasion and to others. The device 
worked well enough with the prince's agents ; but by and by, 
when the young man proposed to get away to Byzantium, — 
a town outside the range of Athens or Satyros, and under the 
government of a Spartan harmost, and therefore a safe place 
for him and not so very far, in case of need, from home, — 
Pasion, on being asked to hand over the money, denied point- 
blank that there was any deposit at all. For the banker 
knew that the Bosporan' s denial had been heard by many, and 
he expected that, if the young man lingered in Athens, his 
surrender to Satyros' people was certain ; if he returned to 
Pontus, that meant death as certainly ; and if he chose to go 
anywhere else — let him go ; Pasion was rid of him, and kept the 
money. The young man reflected that, if he denounced 
Pasion openly and proclaimed the deal they had made, he 
would only involve himself and his family the more, and he 
would not be any nearer the recovery of his own. 

Then the situation was suddenly and startlingly reversed. 
News came that Satyros had been satisfied, and, in token of 
his reconciliation, had advanced Sopaios to more important 
duties and had taken his daughter to be wife to his own son. 
(One can only wonder whether this son was Leucon, who suc- 
ceeded his father the next year.) Pasion saw what would 
follow, and promptly " vanished " his slave bank-manager, 
Kittos, who knew too much about the transaction. The 
Bosporan and his friend Menexenos came to the bank, and, 
as Pasion expected, demanded the surrender of Kittos for 
examination ; and he was ready for them. He alleged that 
the pair of them had corrupted Kittos, obtained six talents out 
of the bank through him, and then " vanished " him them- 
selves ; and he had them off, there and then, " grumbling 
and weeping " as he went, to the polemarch to give sureties 
for those six talents. The Bosporan went away to the Pelo- 
ponnese to look for Kittos, but meanwhile Menexenos found 
him in Athens ; and then fresh shuffles began. Pasion first 
declared Kittos was a free man ; and then he changed tune 



3i6 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and offered him for torture. " So we chose our torturers and 
met him in the temple of Poseidon ; ^ and I demanded that 
they should flog Kittos and twist him till he seemed to them 
to be telling the truth/* At that Pasion changed again, and 
there were arguments. The torturers joined in the discussion, 
and refused at last under the circumstances to torture Kittos 
(which was prudent, if his status was doubtful), but they recog- 
nized that Pasion had handed him over. Pasion now began to 
edge towards paying the money. A meeting in another temple 
followed, — with tears and entreaties on Pasion' s part, — an 
arrangement, another meeting, and an agreement, which 
was put in writing and the document given to a Pheraean, 
Tyro. Meanwhile Menexenos brought a case against Pasion, 
and began to demand Kittos on his own account ; and Pasion 
came to the Bosporan in a very humble strain to get that 
matter settled. Then he suddenly regained his old confidence, 
and it proved that he had bribed Tyro's slaves and secured 
the agreement, and substituted for it a full discharge given 
to him in writing by the son of Sopaios. After that the matter 
came before Satyros, who heard both stories, Kittos appearing 
for Pasion in the character of a free man and a citizen of 
Miletus. Satyros would pronounce no decision, for he saw 
Pasion would pay no attention to it in Athens, but he recog- 
nized that injustice had been done, charged the ship-captains 
to help the son of Sopaios, and himself wrote a letter to the 
Athenian state, which, however, has not come down to us. 
This is the plaintiff's case. 

What the defence was, and what the verdict, we do not 
know. It looks as if the plaintiff had learnt at the anacrisis, or 
preliminary hearing, that Pasion would urge that the whole 
thing was a trumped-up affair and that the plaintiff was not 
a person of substance at all. At least, the repeated insistence 
on his means suggests so much. But we have not Pasion's 
side of the story ; and stories told to Greek law courts vary 
wonderfully as one hears them from one side and the other. 
Nor can we guess the verdict. Leucon succeeded Satyros 
next year, and, even if he married the daughter of Sopaios, it 
did not interfere with his maintaining the friendliest relations 

1 The scene and the purpose and the personnel of the meeting 
strike a modern rather oddly. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 317 

with Athens through a long reign. ^ Still we can deduce 
nothing from the hypothetical indignation of a prince over 
the wrongs of a possible brother-in-law, whom in any case he 
had never chosen. On the other hand, Pasion for nearly a 
quarter of a century lived and managed his bank in the 
Peiraieus with credit and success. He had among his clients 
some of the first names of Athens, and if the speech of 
Isocrates had not survived no one would 6ver have guessed 
that such scandals could possibly have been alleged 
against the head of the banking profession. We can conjec- 
ture nothing from the survival of the speech ; it is hard 
enough to guess why many extant speeches should have 
survived at all, or who could have wished to keep or tran- 
scribe them. Isocrates, it is true, set a value on his speeches, 
but he is emphatic in his preference for themes of national 
interest. 

There were in Athens and elsewhere bankers who failed and 
went bankrupt, to the indignation of the public. 2 But Pasion 
prospered and won the goodwill of the Athenians. As he was 
a metic, he could not invest his gains in land until he was 
made an isoteles ; so he started a shield-factory, which throve, 
as we shall see. It is interesting to find a decade or so earlier 
another shield-factory in the Peiraieus owned by another 
famous family of metics — the household of Cephalos, the 
friend of Socrates, and father of the orator Lysias — who under 
the Thirty lost 700 shields and 120 slaves, and were ruined.^ 
Pasion' s reflections on the fact that he, once sold and bought as 
a slave, was now owner of perhaps a hundred fellow human 
beings, might have been curious, if he reflected at all. The 
father of Demosthenes (one of Pasion' s clients at the bank, 
though he prudently dealt with two banks) owned a sword- 
factory, where very fine swords were made with ivory handles,* 
the sort of thing that Alcaeus' brother two hundred years before 

^ See Demosthenes, Lept. 29 ff., especially § 32, where he says 
Athens annually has from Leucon 400,000 medimnoi of wheat 
{medimnos= i-^ bushels). 

2 [Dem.] Timoth. 68. Various names of bankrupt bankers survive ; 
cf. pro Phorm. 50, 51 ; Steph. A. 62,, 64 ; Apatuv. 9, Heracleides who 
absconded and hid. 

* Lysias, c. Evatosth. 17-19. 

* Demosthenes, Aphobus, A. 10, 20, 30, 31. 



3i8 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

had brought from the far East.^ Aristophanes held that the 
influence of these makers of warlike implements, like that of 
the manufacturers of armour plate and gunpowder in modern 
times, was used against peace ; and he curses them — may the 
shield-dealer be caught by pirates and made to eat raw barley. ^ 
Whatever Pasion's own views, he knew and met the opinions 
of the Demos. '* My father," says his son, '* gave you a 
thousand shields ; he was serviceable to you in many ways, 
and of his own accord he volunteered to give you and did 
give you five triremes, and himself supplied them with crews, 
and was trierarch too." So successful and prosperous every 
way was this former slave turned banker. ^ Plato has a 
savage word for this type of man — " a shabby fellow, who 
saves something out of everything and piles up a treasure- 
hoard (Oriaavpo'7Tot,6<; dvTjp) ; and the mass of men positively 
praise them for it." * 

Pasion had his reward, for '* the Demos of the Athenians 
voted that Pasion be an Athenian, and his descendants also, 
for the good services he has done the city," ^ '* for his good 
manhood shown to the Demos." ^ His son not unreasonably 
magnifies the gift. There were others who thought the 
Athenians far too apt to give it away to anybody and every- 
body. Theramenes spoke of democrats who thought there 
would never be a fine democracy till they had made citizens 
of every slave in the place and every beggar that from very 
poverty would sell the city for a shilling.' We have seen 
how Archinos blocked the generous proposal of Thrasybulus 
to enfranchise all loyal metics.^ Isocrates, fifty years later, 
laments the ease with which the citizenship was given.® 
" We plume ourselves and think much," he says, " of our 
being better born than other men, yet we are more ready to 
share this nobility of ours with anyone who likes than the 
Triballians and Lucanians their lowly birth." In wars 
and in other ways the famous and great houses of old have 
become extinct, and the phratries and rolls are full of people 

. 1 See Chapter II. p. 40. ^ Aristophanes, Peace, 447. 

3 Steph. A. 85. 4 Plato, Rep. viii. 554A. 

5 c. Neaeram, 2 ; c. Nicostr. 18. * c. Neaeram, 89. 

' Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 48. ^ 'Adr]vaL<ov ILoXireia, 40. 
9 De Pace (355 B.C.), 50, S8, 89. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 319 

who have no connexion with the city. " Yet we should 
count happy, not the city that Hghtly herds together a mass 
of citizens from all mankind, but that which guards more 
than any other the race of them who founded her in the 
beginning." Yet he too would wish (it appears from the 
same pamphlet) to see the city full of merchants and foreigners 
and metics. Pasion, no doubt, had meant all along to achieve 
the citizenship and was glad to have it. It was of value to a 
banker in various ways. His business involved a good deal 
of risk, and it was well to have friends^ — especially to have 
the state as a friend. 

One thing that strikes a modern reader of the speeches 
that survive of those delivered in commercial cases is the 
high rates of interest. A dowry is owed at the rate of 10 per 
cent per annum,^ or even 18 per cent.^ ApoUodorus mortgages 
a lodging-house at 16 per cent.^ Chrysippos lends a man 
2000 drachmas on a voyage to Bosporos and back at 30 per 
cent ; * but here we touch the sea and the risks to ships sailing 
without chart or compass over unlighted waters, with the 
constant dangers of piracy and war. The understanding in 
such cases was that if the ship went down, the loan was lost. 
In the speech against Zenothemis we have a story of an 
attempt to scuttle the ship to be rid of the liability, while 
the borrowed money was safe in another direction, and the 
goods, on which it had been borrowed, had never been in the 
ship at all. International loans were not yet invented ; few 
people would have taken the risk — governments ^ were too 
unstable, and to raise a tax to pay interest to a foreigner in 
another city would have been to invite trouble. Where 
state and municipality tended to coincide, municipal loans 
did not occur. When Athens wanted a war-tax in a special 
hurry, she raised it by proeisphora — by making the richest 

^ Demosthenes, 30, Onefor. A. 7. 

2 Demosthenes, 27, Aphobus, A. 17. I am told that in the East 
generally interest is much higher to this day than anything great 
commercial countries are accustomed to. It depends entirely on 
available surplus. Ten per cent for money is quite common in 
Russia now. 

3 [Dem.] 53, Nicostr. 13. ■* [Dem.] c. Phorm. 23. 

^ Not " governments " in the modern sense of " ministries," of 
course. 



320 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

men in the various demes pay eisphora for the whole deme, 
and permitting them, indeed assisting them (if they 
preferred unpopularity), to recover from their neighbours. 
A banker might, indeed, have foreign business of a 
semi-political sort, as when Phormion's ships were held up 
and Stephanos was sent off to Byzantium, to negotiate for 
them. 

Pasion numbered among his clients some of the best 
known people in Athens — the financier-statesman Agyrrhios, 
apparently, before he reached the top of his fame ; Callistratus, 
conspicuous at home and in exile ; and (for our purposes the 
most interesting of them) Timotheos the general, the son of 
the more famous Conon. Timotheos, like some other great 
adventurers, lived a life that was almost as courageous and 
various in its finances as it was in war and politics ; and 
Pasion stood by him again and again. For instance, in 374, 
Timotheos was on the very verge of setting sail with a fleet 
from the Peiraieus, and found himself in want of money. 
In a hurry he came to Pasion and begged a loan of 135 1 
drachmas, 2 obols — and would Pasion please pay it to his 
agent Antimachos. Antimachos sent his clerk Autonomos 
for the money ; and Phormion, the manager, paid it, making 
a careful note of the date, the names, and the whole trans- 
action. Next year the situation was desperate. Timotheos 
was deposed from his command, and was on trial, with 
Antimachos (who was actually put to death) ; his property 
was all mortgaged, and he had borrowed from a man 1000 
drachmas to pay debts to a number of Boeotian trierarchs 
whose evidence he wanted at the trial — and so on ; and to 
Pasion he came again for money to settle with this creditor. 
Two great foreigners came to plead for him at his trial, one 
being Jason, prince or dynast of Pherae, a very great figure 
in the history of this period ; and they had to be entertained. 
A hundred drachmas were needed for this, which he had from 
the bank, along with some tapestry (which was duly returned) 
and two silver bowls (never returned, though they belonged 
to another client of the bank, to whom 237 drachmas had to 
be paid in lieu of them).^ Timotheos was acquitted, but he 

1 Theophrastus {Characters, 18) says that the suspicious man, when 
he lends a cup, prefers to have a surety for its return." 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 321 

was still in such difficulties that the old Pasion did not press 
him, but next year advanced a further 1750 drachmas to 
discharge the freight of a cargo of logs from King Amjmtas 
of Macedonia, which Timotheos used, when he got home again, 
to build his house, — he had already a fine one with a tower 
of which Aristophanes made fun.^ He was an expensive 
and sumptuous person, and there is an anecdote that, dining 
with Plato one day, he gracefully indicated to his host that 
in preparing the menu he had chiefly thought of the morrow. ^ 
The aged Isocrates twenty years later told how this high- 
mindedness, suitable as it might be for a general, told against 
his popularity, and how he himself had urged Timotheos to 
adopt a more gracious and conciliatory manner — " and he 
said I was right, but he could not change his nature. Still 
he was a gentleman indeed, and worthy of the city and of 
Greece.'* ^ 

At the time of the last loan to Timotheos, Pasion was 
beginning to feel his age — '* he found a difficulty in walking 
up to Athens, and his eye was betraying him.*' (It is such 
passages that bring home to a modern reader how few of our 
ordinary conveniences of life the ancients had— when Socrates 
went down to the Peiraieus, or Pasion up to the city, it was 
on foot.*) He fell ill, and he transferred the bank and the 
shield-factory to his freedman ^ Phormion on a lease — the 
rent to be two talents forty minae per annum, the factory 
yielding a talent and the bank the rest. Phormion, as we 
have seen, was already manager of the bank, and, it appears, 
was as good a servant to Pasion as Pasion had been to his 
owners thirty years before. Phormion was, of course, a metic. 
Among the liabilities of the bank were sums amounting to 
eleven talents which had been lent out on real estate, on 
which Phormion as a foreigner would not be able to distrain. 
This amount of mortgages, it appears, Pasion took over 
himself, and was entered as owing the total eleven talents 

^ Plutus, 180; Athenaeus, xii. 548A; Timoth. 36. 

2 Athenaeus, x. 419. ^ Isocrates, Antid. 129-138. 

* Diogenes Laertius, vi. 2, says that Antisthenes, the Cynic, lived 
in the Peiraieus and "every day walked up the forty stades to hear 
Socrates " — about five miles. 

^ Phorm. 4, rjbr) KaO' iavTov ovTi — lus own master. 
21 



322 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

to the bank. From now on his health declined. The Greeks 
thought meanly of trades that kept a man sitting, and indoors 
all the day ; " they effeminate the body, and make the soul 
much weaker still." ^ Business, it seems generally agreed, 
does not let a man have much exercise ; but Pasion's faculties 
remained pretty clear, though it suited his son later on to 
say that he lost them. He was able, however, to give a fair 
account of the moneys owing to him — as Timotheos was to 
find.^ In the year 370 Pasion died. 

The Athenians took a good deal of interest in the estates 
and wills of their fellow-citizens, but, as Lysias says,^ " you 
have often been mistaken as to men's property. -, . . For 
instance, there was Ischomachus ; while he lived, everybody, 
so I hear, supposed he would have more than seventy talents ; 
but when he died his two sons did not get as much as ten 
talents each " ; and so on through a gossiping list, which 
may be of more value to the modern reader than to the orator's 
contemporaries. For one thing, it serves to emphasize the 
shifting of wealth from the great families of the fifth century to 
new ones. Nicias and Callias had been supposed to be worth 
a hundred and two hundred talents, but their descendants were 
possessed of scarcely a year's interest on such sums. After all 
this, it is remarkable to find that the ex-slave Pasion actually 
did leave seventy talents, which his children and his wife 
inherited. By way of comparison we may recall that the 
father of Demosthenes left quite a comfortable fortune of 
fourteen talents, and One tor thirty. * Pasion's will has features 
which strike us strangely, but in reality it was drawn up on quite 
conventional lines. ^ The law of Solon secured equality of 
treatment for all acknowledged legitimate sons ; * and here 
there were two, ApoUodorus aged twenty-four and probably 
already married, and Pasicles aged ten. The elder had the 

1 Xen. Oecon. 4, 2. ^ Timoth. 42. ' Lysias, xix. 46-52. 

* Demosthenes, Aphobus, A. 5 ; Onetor. A. 10. 

" For a delightful parody of the laws of inheritance see Aristophanes, 
Birds, 1 64 1, on the prospects of Herakles in case of Zeus' death — very 
slight, for as he has not been enrolled among the phratores, uncle 
Poseidon will succeed, and Athena will be the eTrUXrjpos. Solon's law 
is cited. 

« The crucial case is that of Mantias and Plango's false oath 
(Demosthenes, xxxix. 6 ; xl. 48). 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 323 

eldest son's complimentary portion — a lodging-house in this 
case. The lease of bank and factory was to continue in Phor- 
mion's hands till Pasicles came of age (at eighteen) ; Phormion 
was to be one of his guardians and was not to start a bank 
on his own account without leave of the two brothers. The 
widow Archippe, with a dowry of three talents forty minae, 
was to marry Phormion.^ 

The last clause annoyed ApoUodorus exceedingly, both at 
the time and afterwards. But Demosthenes has no difficulty 
in showing that it was a thing very usually done among bankers. ^ 
Bankers were not yet gentlemen — they were mostly manu- 
mitted slaves, and after all one was as good as another — and 
the arrangement was generally a satisfactory one. It secured 
the manager of the concern for the family, and in this case the 
manager was a man of proved capacity. ^ What the widow 
thought, no one seems to have inquired, but the feelings of 
widows, heiresses, and girls generally were not much consulted 
in Athens as to such matters as marriage. It says a great deal 
that the marriage of an heiress might be settled by a legal 
action between two competitive kinsmen. 

Ill 

So Pasion was gone, and the destinies of his house, his 
bank, his factory, and his fortune generally were committed 
to Phormion. 

Phormion' s advent to the family is described with savage 
particularity by ApoUodorus. Pasion bought him in the 
regular way at the regular place, the Anakeion or temple of the 
Heavenly Twins. He might just as well have been bought 
by a cook or anybody else, in which case he would have been 
taught the cookery trade or whatever trade it might have 
been ; and he never would have become a great banker at all. 
When he was brought home, Archippe (this is just an amiable 

1 These details are collected from Phorm. 8-10, 34 ; Steph. A. 28, 32. 

^Beloch, Att. Pol. 29, compares the passing of Aspasia to Lysicles 
on the death of Pericles. 

' Demosthenes, 36, Phorm, 30. Demosthenes' own father left his 
widow by will to the guardian, who took the dowry but did not marry 
the lady (Demosthenes, 27, Aphobus, A. 5). 



324 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

conjecture by her son) showered the figs and cakelets over his 
head as he stood by the hearth — a curious httle ceremony of 
welcome for the newly bought, more welcome perhaps to his 
fellow-slaves who scrambled for the sweetmeats than to him- 
self.i Phormion was a barbarian, as ApoUodorus takes pains 
to emphasize — apparently not a Syrian, but of what race we 
are not told.^ Pasion made a Greek of him, and taught him 
letters and a banker's business,^ but he was never able to give 
him a good Greek accent * — any more than he was able to 
give his own son good business qualities or a good character, 
as Demosthenes suggests. ^ 

Archippe is to us a dim figure. Nobody knows how Pasion 
came by her. A careless phrase of the scholar Libanios (about 
380 A.D.) suggests that she may have been his mate in his days 
of slavery, but this is only a guess, and at best it is perhaps 
open to doubt on physiological grounds, as there were twenty 
six or seven years between the births of ApoUodorus and her 
youngest child, and Pasion was already a free man, a me tic, and 
a banker of high repute when ApoUodorus was born. To suit 
his own purposes, ApoUodorus tried some years after her death 
to make out that she was an heiress, which she certainly was 
not in the Athenian sense of the word. No relatives of hers are 
alluded to in any of the speeches, ^ and all that she inherited 
was the gift of her first husband. It is doubtful whether 
she was an Athenian citizen at any stage. Pasion was made 
one, and his sons by her were included in the decree of the 
people, but this hardly covered Archippe, for in that case she 
surely could not have been bequeathed to Phormion. 

Phormion lei: a year or two pass, and then in 368, when 
ApoUodorus was away with the Athenian fleet as trierarch, he 
married Archippe. What followed the return of ApoUodorus, 
he shall tell us himself. ** When I sailed home and realized 
it and saw what was done, I was highly annoyed and took it 

1 [Dem.] 45, Staph. A. 91 ; cf. Aristophanes, Plutus, y62> (and the 
scholiast's note) and 798. 

2 Steph. A. 30, 73, 81, 86. » Steph. A. 72, 7^. 

* Steph. A. 30 ; cf . Phorm. i . Derision of some one's pronunciation, 
Plato Comicus, Frag. 168 (Kock), 7 (Pickard- Cambridge) ; he failed to 
talk Attic, and would say oklov for oytyov, like many copyists of MSS. 
in later days. 

^ Phorm. 44. * ApoUodorus expressly says she had none [Steph. B. 1 9) . 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 325 

very much amiss. I could not bring a private suit against 
him — there were no trials of private causes at that time, you 
had adjourned them all because of the war [with Thebes] ; so 
I entered with the thesmothetai a graphe hybreos against him 
[i.e. made a criminal instead of a civil charge of it, though the 
grounds are obviously very vague]. But as time elapsed, and 
the case was put off several times, as the courts were not sitting, 
my mother had children by him. And after that (for the 
whole truth shall be told you, gentlemen) there were many 
kindly overtures from my mother, as well as entreaties from 
Phormion here— a great deal of talk, very moderate and very 
humble. But to make a long story short," he abruptly skips 
perhaps eighteen years and reaches the present time. ApoUo- 
dorus is a clumsy speaker, who handles grammar awkwardly, 
lets his sentences straggle, and repeats himself ; but his public 
career had taught him it was well to avoid the weak points of 
a case, and there were a good many weak points in his quarrel 
with Phormion. 

The character of ApoUodorus stands out very clearly. 
Demosthenes speaks of his " shouting and shamelessness " ^ — 
which is an opponent's harsh way of describing personal defects 
admitted and lamented — " For my part, men of Athens, what 
with the nature of my countenance, and my quick walk and 
loud voice, I do not count myself among those who are lucky 
in their physical endowment. These things do me no good, 
and they annoy people, and injure me." ^ The Athenians dis- 
liked a quick walk — it was, according to one of their poets, 
the mark of a vulgar mind to walk unrhythmically in the 
street, 3 and Aristotle himself says that the high-minded man 
moves slowly and has a deep voice * — there is nothing shrill or 
excited about him. (All the same, Phormion need not sneak 
about the streets as he does, hugging the wall, with a sour look 
on his face — it does not prove him modest — only a hater of 
men.^) ApoUodorus swaggered round in a chlamys (a woollen 

1 Phorm. 61. 2 steph. A. 77. 

' Alexis, ap. Athen. i. 21, |j^ yap voyi.i^(o tovto rav dveXcvSepav elvaij to 
^adi^eiv appvBiKas iv rais odois. 

* Aristotle, Ethics, iv. 8, 34, p. 1125a. 

" Steph. A. 68. Cf. Plato's picture, drawn quite independently 
{Rep. viii. 55Se). "The men of business, stooping as they walk, and 



326 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

cloak — the sort of luxury affected by Alcibiades and Meidias ^), 
with three attendants at his heels ^ — even passers-by could 
read dissipation in his face.^ He was a spendthrift and a 
braggart, who, so his enemies maintained, wasted his money 
on hetairai and extravagance and gold paint, while he talked 
loud of his services to the state. The last touch was true — 
ApoUodorus is quite definite about his liturgies, his trierarchies 
and eisphora, and the magnificent outfit of the trireme com- 
mitted to him, and its seaworthiness and efficiency ; * but he 
thought he was " moderate in all his personal expenses." ^ 
On this point one curious detail may be noted which suggests 
that he was not Pasion's son for nothing ; he kept accounts, 
and did it with great method and particularity, giving date and 
place and currency and rate of exchange.* 

He married the daughter of a man called Deinias, and we 
gradually pick up some acquaintance with his wife's relatives. 
The last we see of him is in a lawsuit, in which he and his 
brother-in-law are engaged in indicting an enemy for an out- 
rage on propriety and religion.' His wife's cousin, Stephanos, 
was so unnatural as to side with Phormion in the great suit, and 
was therefore capable of every iniquity. In his early married 
life ApoUodorus lived in the country,^ but he had no luck in 
his neighbours, whom he befriended — even ransoming one from 
pirates, though he had to mortgage his lodging-house to do 
it.^ All the reward he got was treachery i^ — a false summons 
involving him in a heavy fine — his orchard plundered and 
the vines and olives mutilated — a small Athenian boy sent 
into his garden to pick the roses (they hoped that ApoUodorus 
would catch him and thrash him and lay himself open to a 

pretending not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert 
their sting — that is, their money — into some one else who is not on his 
guard against them, and recover the parent sum many times multi- 
plied into a family of children : and so they make drone and pauper to 
abound in the State. — Yes, he said, there are plenty of them — that is 
certain " (Jowett). 

1 Plut. Alcih. 23 ; and Demosthenes, Meidias, 133. 

2 If he had had the luck to live a generation later, one at least of 
them would have been a negro (Theophrastus, Characters, 7). 

* Phorm. 45. * Phorm. 39, 45 ; Polycles, 34, 7 ; Steph. A. yS. 
^ Steph. A. yy. « Polycles, 30; 65. ' c. Neaeram. 

* Nicostr. 4. » Nicostr. 6 ff. ^^ Nicostr. 13-17. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 327 

charge of assaulting a citizen) — and, finally, it came to fisticuffs 
by 'the quarries as he walked up from the Peiraieus late one 
evening. To his wife, he assures the court, he was deeply 
attached,^ and he was very anxious as to the welfare and 
dowries of his daughters. ^ It was horrible to think they 
might go undowered and unmarried, when Stephanos could 
marry off their cousin and give her 100 minas as her portion.^ 
One of them, however, found a husband in her mother's 
brother, Theomnestos.* 

But with all his virtues and his neat account-books he 
failed to impress his father's executors, Phormion and Nicocles, 
and in 368, on his return from the trierarchy, they insisted on 
the division of the estate in the interests of the younger brother. 
To this ApoUodorus agreed. Phormion still held a lease of 
the bank and the factory, so the total rent of the two was 
each year divided between the brothers, till Pasicles came of 
age (in 362) and the lease ran out. Phormion received a com- 
plete discharge from all his liabilities to the pair of them, and 
with it permission to have a bank of his own.^ The brothers 
divided the last of the property, ApoUodorus taking the 
factory though it produced only a talent per annum against 
the bank's one talent forty minae, but, as Phormion pointed 
out, it was the safer business.^ 

Meantime, in spite of the friction about Archippe's marriage, 
ApoUodorus, with the aid of Phormion and the bank books, 
was busy in the law courts pursuing his father's debtors,' 
and he was very successful. He recovered some twenty 
talents, Phormion says, but Pasicles never had his full share ; ^ 
which may be a suppressed reason for ApoUodorus taking the 
factory instead of the bank. He acquired a strong taste for 
litigation, which he indulged. He did not limit himself to 
private cases of his own, but embarked on public prosecutions, 
of which Demosthenes mentions five and hints at more.^ 
He certainly did not lack courage. 

The Athenian court was substantially a mere section or 
panel of the sovereign people — so many hundred of them, 
with an odd one added to prevent an equality of votes, for 

^Polycles,6i, ^ Steph. A. 74. ^ Steph. A. 66. 

* Neaera, 2. ^ Phorm. 10. • Phorm, 11. 

' Phorm. 20, 21. « Phorm. 36. • Phorm. 53. 



328 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

every one had to vote and no one could avoid voting. There 
was no trained president — the magistrate in charge was 
selected by lot ; and there was no consultation before the 
vote was taken, there could not well be.^ Quick and intelligent 
as the Athenians were, their impatience of " the strait- waist- 
coat of a legal formula," their want of legal training, and the 
universal instinct for equity, whatever the law says, might 
lead to gross injustice — as gross perhaps as any of which the 
purely legal mind is capable. Law, fact, justice, scurrility, 
pathos, trierarchies, and dying mothers — anything might 
come in. In spite of the assurance offered to the court that, 
while men will readily lie to an arbitrator, it is not the same 
thing to do it " looking in your faces," ^ false witness and 
lying abounded ; and when even false witnesses failed, we 
read that the regular thing was to assure the court that '* you 
all know it," whatever the doubtful point might be.^ Appeals 
to popular passion and political feeling could not in the nature 
of things be excluded. The law might become '* dangerously 
volatile." Again and again a speaker has to plead for the 
maintenance of the law as the safeguard of everybody's liberty. 
Some friends, says a litigant about 400 B.C., advised me not 
to go to law, " not even if I have every confidence in my 
case ; for, said they, many things happen in the law courts 
contrary to what a man would expect, and there is more fluke 
than justice in your decisions." * Sir Henry Maine once 
wrote — and not without warrant — that *' neither the Greeks 
nor any society speaking and thinking in their language ever 
showed the smallest capacity for producing a philosophy of 
law." Yet the Greeks — and by Greeks we chiefly mean the 
Athenians — were the first people who conceived of a society 
based on the art of ruling by law, a society that should in 
every detail rest on the idea of justice, equal and free ; and 
with all that has to be said on the other side, Athens went a 
long way in achieving this ideal. 

In many ways the most interesting and satisfactory of the 
surviving speeches of Apollodorus is the one he delivered 

^ The utmost was a few words with the people on the nearest seats ; 
cf. Polycles, 3. 

2 [Dem.] c. Phorm. 19. ^ Demosthenes, Boeot. B. 53. 

* Isocrates, 18, Callim. 9, 10. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 329 

when he prosecuted Polycles to recover the costs of five months' 
trierarchy. Here he makes the minimum use of laws, of 
clap-trap appeals, and of those deductive arguments which 
the rhetoricians called tekmeria. He tells a plain story, which 
is most illuminative upon naval matters, life at sea, personal 
character, and Athenian ways generally. 

In September 362 news reached Athens of a conjunction 
of doubtful and threatening circumstances in the North 
Aegaean ; in particular the merchants and sea-captains were 
about to sail out of the Black Sea with their freights of wheat, 
and the Byzantines were beginning to hold them up, wheat 
was growing scarce in the Peiraieus, and the price rising. So 
the proposal was carried in the Assembly that the trierarchs 
fit out a fleet for Thracian waters. Among the trierarchs was 
Apollodorus. 

The duties of a trierarch were very extensive. In theory 
the state provided the ship, her tackle and equipments, sails, 
rope, and the like ; ^ it furnished the crew of rowers (vavTac, 
ipiraLy TrKrjpeo/jLa, or Tpirjpdp'^Tjfjba) and supplied wages {puiaOos:) 
and rations (a-tTrjpio-tov) for them. It also paid the marines 
(iirifiaTai) about ten in number. The petty officers — stewards, 
boatswains, carpenters, and above all, pilots and steersmen — 
the trierarch found for himself and paid them himself. A 
crown was sometimes offered to the trierarch who first had 
his trireme in order and at the quayside. 

But much, which the state was required by the laws to 
provide, it was the experience of trierarchs that they had to 
see to for themselves ; and so Apollodorus found. For ex- 
ample, a good deal might depend on the age of the ship. Ships 
were built of timber not quite seasoned because of the difficulty 
of bending it to the needful curves. ^ The ship was given some 
time to dry and her timbers to settle, and then the seams had 
to be calked. The trireme went a good deal out of repair 
if she were long afloat or long laid up.^ What amount of 

1 [Dem.] 51, Cor. Trier. 5 ; Euerg. et Mnes. 26. Cf. Polycles, 34; 
Dittenberger, Sylloge^, No. 153. 

2 Cecil Torr, Ancient Ships, p. 34. 

' Cf. the venomous attack of Lysias on Thrasybulus for sailing to 
the Hellespont in 389 with old ships, " the dangers to be yours, and the 
profits to come to his friends " (Lysias, 28, c. ErgocL 4). 



330 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



cleaning the bottoms needed, how much new timber, calking 
and repairing generally might have to be done, no man could 
well predict ; and I do not know whether the trierarchs or 
the superintendents of the docks had to do this work. In 
any case the trierarch had to sail on the ship — " taking the 
risk of sailing on her in person " ^ — and this would tempt him 
to see for himself that she was in good condition. The same 
applied to the sails and ropes — the trierarch had better look 
well after them himself, as Apollodorus did. Here is his story. 
** When the rowers enrolled by the demesmen did not come 
to me, or just a few and those incapable, I sent them away, 
and mortgaged my property and borrowed money, and so was 
the first to have my ship manned with the best rowers I could 
get, by giving bounties and advance pay to each of them on a 
large scale. Moreover, I fitted out the ship with my own tackle, 
etc., from end to end, and took none of what the state supplied, 
and I decorated it with the utmost possible beauty, more 
expensively than the other trierarchs." 

He was never done with trouble with his rowers. He 
treated them well, but twice over almost the whole crew of 
them deserted, especially when in the course of duty he was 
sent back to the Peiraieus (§ ii). His own high-class rowers 
were not so keen on staying with him as poorer hands ; they 
were everywhere sure of a job. The successor appointed to 
take over his ship refused to do so for five months, in spite of 
appeals and demands. Polycles on one occasion talked to 
Apollodorus about the way in which he had managed his ship — 
'* Have you so outdone everybody in wealth that you alone of 
the trierarchs must have your own tackle and gold decorations ? 
Who could put up with your lunacy and extravagance — a crew 
utterly spoiled, accustomed to no end of advance pay, to 
immunities from the ordinary ship duties, and to washing in a 
bath — marines in luxury, and the ship's servants too with full 
pay ? You've taught the whole expedition bad ways, and 
you're very largely to blame for the soldiers being worse behaved 
with all the other trierarchs ; they want the same as yours.'* 
Apollodorus answered with spirit and moderation that if 
Polycles did not like his men, if he would only take over the 
ship (as he was legally bound to do) he might find his own rowers, 

1 Polycles, 59. 



:i 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 331 

marines and all, if he liked, who would sail with him for nothing. 
" But in any case take over the ship.*' 

The service was very hard, and he draws a striking picture 
of his work in convoying wheat-ships across open sea, " about 
the setting of the Pleiades/' One night especially he describes, 
which they spent riding at anchor (instead of being beached) 
without food or sleep, expecting to be attacked ; and on top of 
all there was a gale with thunder and rain.^ He found the 
government careless, the allies helpless, and the generals un- 
sound. He was detailed, for instance, to go to a certain port ; 
but he learnt on the way that it was to pick up an exile — an 
illegal act — and he refused. There was remonstrance, but he 
was backed up by his steersman who would take orders from 
nobody else — ** Apollodorus is the trierarch and is liable for all 
he does ; I get my wages from him, and I'll sail where he tells 
me." 

The expense was enormous. Lysias tells us of trierarchs 
whom it cost 80 or 100 minas.^ Apollodorus was kept short — 
once for eight consecutive months — of the men's pay, and had 
to pay them himself as best he could. His voyage is punctu- 
ated with borrowings and mortgages for the purpose. In 
this he says he was much helped by being known to be the son 
of Pasion.3 His story serves to explain why the rich felt so 
bitterly about these state-services or liturgies. Lysias men- 
tions a man who was seven times trierarch, several times had 
to furnish a tragic chorus, and often to pay eisphora — the 
expense running up in all to nine talents two thousand drach- 
mas. * Isocrates declaims on the misery of life involved by the 
multitude of commands and liturgies and all the troubles 
involved by them.^ The oligarch in Theophrastus' Characters 
(29) cries out : *' When will they be done ruining us with these 
public services and trierarchies ? How hateful the whole breed 
of demagogues is ! Theseus was the beginning of the city's 
troubles, when he made one city out of twelve and let down 
the monarchy. And it served him right that he was their first 
victim ! " Another type of oligarch took another line and 
would say at every pubHc Assembly, and in every other place 
too : " We are the people who perform the public services, 

^ Polycles, 22, 23. 2 Lysias, 19, Aristoph. 42, 43. ' Polycles, 56- 
* Lysias, 19, Aristoph. 57, 58. "» Isocrates, 8, de Pace, 128. 



332 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

we are the payers of proeisphora for you, we are the rich ! '* 
But Theophrastus' Boastful Man (6) did better still ; he would 
reckon up in public how much he spent in relieving distress 
during the famine (330-326 B.C.), and ** add that he does not 
count any of the trierarchies or public services he has per- 
formed." 

When Apollodorus reached Athens after his seventeen 
months of the fleet, he found his mother dying. Six days later 
she was dead, and troubles with Phormion began again. 
Apollodorus made certain demands ; four private arbitrators 
were chosen to go into them ; and Phormion paid what was 
asked for the sake of peace. Apollodorus for the second time 
gave his stepfather a full discharge. He also accepted a 
fourth share of Archippe's estate, and thereby admitted the 
legahty of her second marriage and the legitimacy of his half- 
brothers. Phormion received the citizenship in 360, and for 
some years he was left in peace by Apollodorus. With Pasicles 
he seems always to have managed very well. 

Apollodorus was already a public character,^ and it was 
apparently now that he prosecuted the generals he had dis- 
covered to be " unsound." One of them was put to death. 
In 350 he did the state a more useful service. He was a 
member of the Boule or Council, and as such he carried first 
the Boule and then the Assembly with him in a resolution that 
the Demos should decide whether the balance of money in the 
hands of the administration should go to the Theoric fund or 
to the War chest. It was the policy of Demosthenes that the 
War chest should come first, and the Demos voted so. Apollo- 
dorus had as councillor sworn to take the best counsel for the • 
Athenian Demos, and he supposed Demos was entitled to do 
as Demos pleased with his own. But an informer, Stephanos 
by name, prosecuted him on a charge of illegality, producing 
false witness to a long outstanding debt to the Treasury, and 
pleading for a fine of 15 talents. Apollodorus' whole fortune 

1 Cf . the picture drawn by Plato of the democratic man [Rep, viii. 
561D) : " Often he is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says 
and does whatever comes into his head. . . . His life has neither law 
nor order. . . ." All this description was written before the floruit of 
Apollodorus, but his life was " motley and manifold and an epitome 
of the lives of many." 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 333 

at the time was only about three, so that it was indeed fortunate 
that the court was content to fine him one talent only ; that 
was serious enough. Pasion's seventy talents — or ApoUodorus' 
share of them — had sadly diminished in twenty years. 

It was now that ApoUodorus committed the crowning folly 
of his career. He saw Phonnion prosperous, and he conceived 
the notion that there was something wrong in the slave doing 
so well, while things went ill with the master. In an evil hour 
he brought an action against Phormion to recover twenty 
talents — the property of Pasion left in the bank and unclaimed, 
or at least unrecovered, these twenty years and more. By 
this time Phormion was tired of his stepson, and he turned to 
Demosthenes. The law permitted a special form of plea, a 
demurrer (irapaypacj)!]), to bar the action, and on this paragraphe 
the defendant had the first word. Phormion mounted the bema 
and said something or other, concluding very much as Diony- 
sodorus did in another case : " 1 have said all I can. I should 
like one of my friends to speak for me. This way, Demos- 
thenes.'* It appears from Aeschines that such a call for 
Demosthenes was liable to be echoed by the whole court.^ 

As a great deal of this chapter has been drawn from the 
speech Demosthenes wrote for Phormion, there is no need 
to go over the facts again. The speech was a short one. 
** Pour out the water," says the speaker at the end, indicating 
that the water clock (clepsydra) allowed more time than the 
case needed. On two main legal points the defence rested — 
a twenty years' interval exceeded by fifteen years the period 
within which such an action as ApoUodorus' was legal — a 
technicality perhaps. Very well, then : twice over ApoUodorus 
had given Phormion a full discharge. On either point 
ApoUodorus was wrecked. But an Athenian court did not 
care for law so abruptly used, so the orator went over the facts 
of the case with a masterly lucidity and force, demolishing as 
he went what he knew would be the case of the plaintiff. 
Pasion's papers had been destroyed ? But ApoUodorus 
accepted them when the estate was divided ; he allowed them 
to pass when Pasicles came of age ; he used them in all those 

^ Aeschines, in Ctes. 203 : ** Let no one count it a, merit to himself, 
if, when Ctesiphon asks whether he shall call Demosthenes, he is the 
first to shout, * Call him ! call him ! ' " 



334 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

many lawsuits ; and Pasicles, the other brother, is entirely 
satisfied. The marriage of Archippe ? It was the usage of 
bankers, and Apollodorus by accepting a fourth part of her 
estate had admitted it was right. Pasion's will a forgery ? 
Then how came Apollodorus by the elder son's presbeia, the 
lodging-house ? For twenty years the will has been accepted. 
No, the real ground of the action is that Apollodorus is a 
waster and means to blackmail a man who owes his position 
to his character, his industry and integrity. The speech is, 
as Schafer says, a masterpiece with its portrayal of character 
and its ethical warmth. 

The court, despite the heliastic oath to hear both sides alike, 
refused to hear Apollodorus at all. He was met with shouts of 
Kard^a — the famous cry that Philocleon uses in the Wasps ^ — 
and he came down. He did not carry a fifth of the votes, and 
so became liable to a penalty, payable to Phormion, of an obol 
on the drachma, a sixth of the sum claimed, which on twenty 
talents came to three talents forty minae. Whether Phormion 
ever got it, or how he got it, we are not told. 

Apollodorus, however, was not yet done. He prosecuted 
one of Pasion's witnesses for perjury, a man called Stephanos, 
but not the Stephanos of the prosecution of 350. How his 
conviction could materially have affected the main issue it 
is hard to see. But Apollodorus does not confine himself to 
Stephanos ; he takes his chance of explaining to a law court 
his case against Phormion, and it is a very bad one. The 
will was a forgery, because to make such a will Pasion must 
have been mad, and a madman could not make a valid will. 
He uses an absurd verbal juggle hard to represent in English : 
an adopted son was in Attic Greek called made, and a man so 
made had some limitations of freedom in making a will ; Pasion 
was a made citizen — made so by law. Archippe, he maintained, 
was an heiress, which was untrue. A pitiful set of sophistries 
takes on a still more unpleasant character when he accuses 
Phormion of having seduced his mother, and dismisses Pasicles 
from consideration by the surmise that Pasicles may prove 
to have been the first of Phormion' s sins against the family. 
After this one loses sympathy for Apollodorus. 

We are not told how the case ended, but we can surely 
1 Aristophanes, Wasps, 979. 



THE HOUSE OF PASION 335 

guess. And here Phormion goes out of our story. An inscrip- 
tion relative to docks, which is dated by Dittenberger between 
334-3 and 331-0, mentions an Archippos, son of Phormion of 
Peiraieus ; — the names strongly suggest a son of Phormion the 
banker in the Peiraieus and his wife Archippe. We know no 
more of them. 

Of ApoUodorus we hear again. A few years after his 
failure against Phormion he brought an action against a certain 
Neaera, alleged to be the wife of the Stephanos who had pro- 
secuted him for illegality. But wife of an Athenian she could 
not be, for she was an alien ; and for passing herself off as 
wife of a citizen, she is liable to be sold as a slave ; and for 
that ApoUodorus pleads. She was, he says, a foreigner and a 
hetaira, and her daughter another of the trade, twice palmed 
off on citizens as an Athenian girl and twice repudiated. He 
goes relentlessly through the whole story of the wretched 
women, from the purchase of Neaera, with six others, by a 
woman skilled in these matters, emphasizing point after point, 
shame and sale and shame again, bringing in well-known names 
as he goes, Lysias and Chabrias for instance, and citing wit- 
nesses for each squalid episode. State religion is involved 
too, for Phano, the daughter, had been the wife of the King 
Archon (till he found her out and drove her off), and as such 
she had performed the sacred rites of the Queen on the city's 
behalf. The speech ends with evidence to a challenge made to 
Stephanos to submit Neaera' s slave- women to torture on the 
point of the parentage of Stephanos' children, and a final plea 
to the court to remember that the gods — ** those gods against 
whom the defendants have sinned — will see how each man of 
you votes ; so vote justly, and avenge the gods and yourselves 
as well." How this case ended, we have to confess, as in so 
many instances, we do not know. With it ApoUodorus passes 
out of history. 

It is not perhaps very often in histqry that we are able 
to follow the fortunes of a single family with much detail 
over fifty or sixty years. Yet when we can, what light may be 
thrown on the society whose history we are studying ! None 
of the leading figures in this chapter is of any great importance, 
yet their story takes us into the streets and bazars and courts 
and counting-houses of Athens, and gives us a new background 



336 



FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



and a new sense for the world in which those greater figures 
moved whom we know elsewhere as framers of a great language 
and makers of history. In this city Socrates and Plato lived, 
and when Plato spoke and wrote of the money-making man, 
and his aims and spirit and influence, it is far from incon- 
ceivable that some of his impressions, some of the impulses 
that drove him to think of the matter, came from this house 
of great bankers, whose son and stepson may in his turn have 
contributed something to the picture of the Democratic man. 
But we must be just to Apollodorus, for he was public-spirited 
and had enough intelligence to share some of the ideals of 
Demosthenes. If his life was disorderly and his spirit quarrel- 
some, me tic as he was by origin, he was a true Athenian in 
these matters, and better than most in his readiness to serve 
the country of which he was " a citizen by public vote.'* 
Perhaps they were not far wrong who held that the more 
metics Athens drew to herself the better. At all events, it was 
of such men that the great cities of the following age were 
formed, and Alexandria, Pergamus, and Antioch have made 
gifts to mankind too great to allow us to dismiss them with 
the easy contempt of an Athenian gentleman. 



CHAPTER XI 
COUNTRY LIFE 

WHEN Xenophon left Athens for the camp of Cyrus, it 
was probably with little thought that he was bidding 
farewell to his country and his people for ever.^ Yet, 
as we have already seen, the death of Cyrus left him with the 
rest of the Ten Thousand stranded in the heart of the Persian 
kingdom ; and, when at last the way to the sea was found, he 
felt himself still involved in the fortunes of his fellow-soldiers, 
and so he passed with them into the service of Sparta, then 
at war with Persia or with one Persian satrap and another. 
So far there was little to provoke much comment in Athens. 
He had not exactly been a soldier in the army of Cyrus as he 
says, and when Agesilaos started for Asia, Athens and Sparta 
were nominally at peace. But in 395 the chance came to be 
independent of Spaita, and the Athenians, though at great 
risk, took it and joined in an alliance with Thebes. Before 
long the European situation was such that the recall of Agesilaos 
was inevitable. He brought back with him what still held 
together of the Ten Thousand ; and the former '' commander 
of the Cyreians " ^ had nothing to do but go with them. Under 
this modest phrase (in a story of the year 398 B.C.) it has long 
been understood that Xenophon indicated himself. Even if 
he were no longer their commander, his position was a very 
difficult one — ^he was by now a personal friend of Agesilaos, 
but the king was coming home again to fight Athens among 
the allies of the Thebans. At Coroneia in August, 394, Agesilaos 
defeated the Thebans and their allies in battle, and Xenophon, 

1 It has been discussed whether he may have paid a visit to Athens 
between leaving Seuthes and serving under Thibron. If he did, it was 
a mere passing visit, but even so the evidence for it is very shght, if it 
is more than mere surmise. 

2 Hellenica, iii. 2, 7. 

22 



338 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

it would appear, was present. He had never had any Uking 
for Thebes, and it would have seemed natural to suppose 
that he fought as usual at the head of his Cyreians, but that he 
expressly states that " Herippidas was in charge of mercen- 
aries." ^ The phrase may seem ambiguous, though perhaps 
to a close reader of the story it should be quite expHcit. 
Whether we take it as a small piece of tacit defence or not, 
for the rest he maintains complete silence about himself till 
we find him an exile at Scillus. The date and the grounds 
of his being exiled are alike unknown to us. Perhaps he was 
already an exile.^ But even so, the verdict of a sympathetic 
French critic will appeal to many : *' however it be, even if we 
eliminate the aggravating circumstances which are neither 
proved nor probable, the mere fact of his presence at Coroneia 
remains to revolt our conscience and our reason together." ^ 

In any case, the Athenians seem to have had some such 
feeling about him, and they passed a decree of exile against 
him — a fact which, I think, tells against the sceptical opinion 
held by some modem readers that Xenophon was not really 
a conspicuous figure in the great march to the sea. It would 
be difficult to blame them for this step if Xenophon really 
fought at Coroneia. Even if the decree preceded the battle, 
it was not altogether unnatural in view of what we surmise of 
Xenophon's antecedents * and of his very prominent and out- 
standing position in the story of the last seven years' relations 
between Greece and Persia. At the same time, when we con- 
sider the feeling of the Greeks and what they tolerated in 
exiles, who fought and intrigued savagely and relentlessly 
against their native cities, — as in the case of Alcibiades, to 
look no further, — Xenophon, if he had fought against Athens 
at all, might have claimed the pardon of his contemporaries 
with some title to it — in which case posterity would have, I 
think, to be slow in giving judgment against him. But it is 

1 Hellenica, iv. 3, 15, i^evdyei ^eviKov (no article). Plutarch definitely 
says Xenophon rrap^v avros rw 'Ayrja-iKda (rvvayKovi^ofievos {Agesil. 1 7), 
i.e. fought in the battle. 

2 Grote, viii. 478, believes decidedly that Xenophon was banished 
after Coroneia. Croiset has the same view. 

2 A. Croiset, Xenophon, p. 1 20. 

* His very moderate friendship for democracy, and the possibility 
of his service under the Thirty. Cf. Beloch, Gr. Gesch, ii. 472. 



COUNTRY LIFE 339 

not proved that he fought against his country ; and in any 
case, whether he was or was not as yet an exile, his position, 
due to no very clear fault of his own, was embarrassing and 
ambiguous. However, like Thucydides, he was to be an 
exile — and posterity in both cases has been the gainer. Xeno- 
phon mentions the fact twice — once in describing Scillus, where 
he lived an actual exile, and once in speaking of his prepara- 
tions to leave Seuthes, when he says definitely that he was not 
yet an exile.^ This last fact is surely fatal to the theory of 
later Greek writers that he was exiled for taking part in an 
expedition against the Great King. 

Throughout Greek history, at least till Alexander threw 
open the East and the new cities rose, it is plain that an exile 
was committed to a very difficult and insecure life. Brilliant 
as his career had been, Athens had discarded Xenophon, and 
Sparta did not care for foreigners. From his own narrative 
it is plain that he must have had enough of mercenaries. So 
a military career was closed to him, even if he wished it, and 
when we next find him, it is settled in some contentment in a 
village of Elis on an estate of his own. When he describes his 
abode and its surrounding country, he says the Spartans gave 
him the place. They apparently took it from the Eleians 
during or after the campaigns described by Xenophon in the 
Hellenicay^ which are dated variously between 401 and 398. 
More strictly speaking, Sparta secured " autonomy " for the 
Triphylian towns, but in any case Elis was dispossessed of the 
land, and by and by Xenophon was settled there. 

Xenophon lived at Scillus, it would appear, for rather 
more than twenty years. Then the battle of Leuctra shook 
the Spartan power to pieces, and Messenians, Arcadians, and 
Eleians came by their own again. Xenophon and his sons, 
according to one story, had to fly, and found refuge in Corinth ; ^ 
but guides in Elis told Pausanias * that Xenophon appealed 

1 Xen. Anab. v. :i, y ; vii. 7, 57. Pausanias, v. 6, 4 (for the ex- 
pedition against the friendly Persian King) ; Dio Chrysostom, vii. i ; 
Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 7, § 51 (for Laconism). It may be noted that 
there are those who think Thucydides, already an exile, was present on 
the Spartan side as a spectator at the battle of Mantineia, August, 418 ; 
cf. Grundy, Thuc. p. 38. 

2 Hellenica, iii. 2, 21-31. 

' Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 8, § 53. • Pausanias, v. 6, 4. 



340 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

to the Olympic Council and, *' obtaining forgiveness from the 
Eleians, lived without molestation in Scillus," and in fact died 
and was buried there. But perhaps the guides were more 
eager to keep a literary celebrity than contemporaries a hunt- 
ing gentleman who was conspicuously a friend of the Spartans. 
Xenophon makes a very happy digression in the Anabasis, 
when he is speaking of the division of spoils, to tell us how 
he managed about that part of the tithe for Apollo and 
Artemis which was entrusted to him. Artemis' portion he 
left for the time with her temple-keeper Megabyzos at Ephesus. 
Afterwards, he says,^ " when Xenophon was in exile and was 
living by now at Scillus near Olympia, settled there by the 
Lacedaemonians, Megabyzos came to Olympia to see the 
festival, and handed over to him his deposit. Xenophon took 
it and bought for the goddess a plot of ground where the god 
indicated. A river called Selinus, it happened, ran through 
the plot, just as at Ephesus a river Selinus runs by the temple 
of Artemis. In both streams there are fish and shellfish. 
On the estate at Scillus there is hunting of all the beasts of 
chase there are. He built an altar and a temple with the 
dedicated money, and ever after tithed the fruits of the land 
and made a sacrifice to the goddess, and all the citizens and 
neighbours with their wives took part in the festival. The 
goddess herself provided the banqueters with meat, loaves, 
wine, and sweetmeats, with portions of the victims from the 
sacred pasture and of the animals killed in hunting. For 
Xenophon's boys and those of the other citizens made a hunt 
for the festival ; and grown men, too, who wished, joined in. 
The game was taken partly from the sacred ground itself and 
partly from Pholoe, boars and gazelles and deer. The spot is 
on the road from Lacedaemon to Olympia, about twenty 
stades (two and a half miles) from the temple of Zeus in 
Olympia. In the dedicated ground there is meadow-land, and 
hills covered with forest, well fitted to rear pigs, goats, cattle, 
and horses. Even the sumpter animals of the visitors to the 
festival have their entertainment. Round the temple is a 
grove of fruit trees planted. The temple is modelled after that 
in Ephesus — a small copy of it ; and the image is a copy in 
cypress-wood of the golden one in Ephesus. Beside the temple 
1 Anab. v. 3, 7-13. 



COUNTRY LIFE 341 

is a stele with these words : ' The place is sacred to Artemis. 
He that holds it and enjoys the fruits thereof shall sacrifice 
the tithe of it year by year. From the residue he shall keep 
in order the temple. If any man fail in this, the goddess 
will look to it.' " 

The passage shows us the man — with his piety — his gift 

for arrangement and love of order — his interest in hunting — 

his neighbourliness — and, perhaps one might add, his attention 

to diet, ample but not luxurious. ** So there," says Diogenes 

Laertius,^ *' he continued — hunting and entertaining his 

friends and writing history " ; and there can be little doubt 

that with these and other interests, hardly less keen, he must 

have enjoyed life. And yet, there is a touch of the tragic 

in it. 2 It is not the life he had chosen. The great career 

in the East with Cyrus for his friend is gone. He will not see 

the Attic deme of his boyhood again, the hills where he first 

hunted, the fields where he learnt to love farming. Sparta 

took little notice of foreigners or their admiration. So a 

man who had dreamed of doing great things himself has to 

settle down to picture them — great deeds done by others, by 

heroes he has known in the body, by dream-heroes he has 

fashioned in his brain. But perhaps even so he was doing 

more than he thought or hoped ; for not every writer of 

books could boast of having set on fire with a passion that 

never died while life lasted, such men as Zeno and Alexander. 

A modern traveller will tell us more of the outward scene. ^ 

" On emerging from the defile, a new extent of low country 

presents itself, richly wooded and well watered. This is the 

vale of the Alpheus. We coast for some distance along the 

northern base of the same mountain, the declivities of which 

on this side are of the finest description of rock scenery, 

beautifully clothed with forest- trees and evergreens. Every 

half-mile gushes a copious fountain of pure water from the 

roots of gigantic planes, forming so many tributaries to the 

sacred stream that flows in the vale below. The features of 

1 Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 8, § 52. 

2 On this see Ivo Bruns, Lit. Portrdt, p. 414. 

^ W. Mure, Journal of a Tour in Greece, vol. ii. p. 273 (1842). E. N. 
Gardiner, Greek Athletic Sports (1910), p. s^, says that in old days the 
vegetation was far more luxuriant than now. 



342 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the landscape now gradually undergo a complete change. 
The common deciduous oak gives place to the ilex, and soon 
after to the black round-headed pine, which covers the country 
on each side of the river in scattered groups, to some distance 
north of the plain of Olympia. The soil becomes sandy, and 
the hillocks and rocky eminences which enliven the surface 
of the valley assume a variety of fantastical forms, often 
presenting so close a resemblance to ruined forts or towns 
that the illusion is scarcely dispelled till the traveller reaches 
the spot. This region is described by Pausanias as precisely 
similar in character in his own age. In the midst of it, on 
the left bank of the river, a few miles to the east of Olympia, 
was Scillus.** 

Such was the place — a little out of the world in general, 
but at festival- time a centre of life, a centre where there 
gathered Greeks of all sorts from every Greek land and settle- 
ment, men with every kind of interest from athletics to 
politics and philosophy — two or three miles only from 
Xenophon's home.^ 

What that home was like — or what he wished it to be — 
we can read in his little book the Oeconomicos — a work with 
a charm of its own, and unique in being the one presentment 
that we have of country life in Classical Greece. It has never 
lacked admirers. Cicero did it into Latin, Ruskin (with the 
co-operation of two friends) into English. It was the founda- 
tion on which Ruskin built all his studies in Political Economy, 
his biographer and editor tells us.^ It shows *' the ideal of 
domestic life." 

The fabric of the story is simple. Socrates, after some 
talk with Critobulus, tells him how he met a real kalos 
kdgathos, and then narrates their conversation. It was not 
otherwise known that Socrates had so much interest in fields 
and farms and their cultivation, and most readers feel that 
for the larger part of the book the real Socrates is a far-away 
memory, though there are flashes of some one very like him 
from time to time. The centre of the book is the kalos 
kdgathos, Ischomachus, and he is led on to do most of the 
talking, never dreaming it was all to be reported. He is, as 

1 Cf. Grote, viii. 480. 

2 Collected Works, vol. xxxi., Bibliotheca Pastorum. 



COUNTRY LIFE 343 

Grote says, translating the word of Socrates, *' the model of 
an Athenian gentleman, and the life he lives " — ** it is the 
life of an English lord," cries a French critic.^ Perhaps he 
is a little like Sir Roger de Coverley, but of a more robust 
intelligence. While Xenophon regrettably has to live in EHs, 
Ischomachus has his home in Attica, and his biographer has his 
eye on his own country. What is more, he means his book to 
be read there, and in his own perfectly clear but unobtrusive 
way he calls attention to certain matters of importance. 

The father of Ischomachus was a man of the same sort 
as his son — " he would never let me buy a farm in good 
condition ; but if he chanced on one idle or unplanted either 
through the neglect or the incompetence of the owners, he 
would advise me to buy it. A cultivated estate, he said, cost 
a lot of money and allowed of no improvement ; and that 
took away the pleasure, for he held that to see whatever 
you owned steadily improving was a great joy.'* He made 
big profits out of it, and besides it was his hobby — it gave 
him something to do.^ The same interest Ischomachus had, 
and it was perhaps to his passion for agriculture that he owed 
a good deal of his health and energy, for he lives a strenuous 
life. 3 Socrates remarks that at one and the same time he 
manages to combine a recipe for health and strength with 
efficiency for war and the advancement of his fortune. This 
is true, for Ischomachus says quite frankly he wishes to be 
rich — it is a pleasant thing to be able to honour the gods in 
the grand style, to help a friend in need, and " so far as lies 
in my power, not to leave my city unadorned with anything 
wealth can supply." * He is always master of the situation 
— never bullies, is never worried — but by a kind of dogged 
gentleness and persuasiveness he carries his point. He has 
a knack of being obeyed and of being obeyed intelligently ; he 
makes his people see what is wanted, he treats them as reason- 
able creatures, and makes them think. If he has a defect, 
it is that, in M. Hemardinquer's phrase, he is " un peu trop 
sermonneur" — "the Greeks," he says, '* and Xenophon 
above all, cannot bring themselves to be right and to be done 

^ Hemardinquer, La CyropSdie, p. 116. 

^ OeCOn. 20, 22-25: OTTCOS €X^Ol O Ti TTOloir) Sifia KOi U)(fiiKoVfl€VOS rfSoiTO. 

* Oecon. 1 1, 14. * Oecon. 11,9. 



344 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

with it." 1 Sometimes the people round him must have 
found him a shade too improving, and done absurd or silly 
things just as relief from being so steadily reasonable. 

We have seen already that there actually was a historical 
Ischomachus who might have talked with Socrates, of whom 
Lysias tells us in a speech, dated 387, that as long as he lived 
everybody reckoned he must be worth more than seventy 
talents, but when he died his two sons hardly inherited ten 
talents apiece. ^ But Xenophon seems to have taken his name 
for his own purposes, and made an ideal figure of what he 
would have wished himself to be. There is no dark line in 
the picture, and he has all the good qualities we recognize in 
Xenophon — order, piety, control, persuasion, kindness, and 
sweet temper — and perhaps some of his foibles. Ischomachus, 
we might even say, is Cyrus — the Cyrus of the Cyropaedeia — 
in domestic life — a republican Cyrus who has gone back like 
a Washington to his Mount Vernon. 

More interesting in some ways than Ischomachus is his 
wife, for here we are given a glimpse inside a real Athenian 
home of what we might call the upper middle classes. The 
age saw woman given a new place altogether in Tragedy, but 
neither there nor in Comedy could we expect to see the real 
domestic life. Aristophanes has many allusions to the daily 
roimd, the baby, the Thracian " slavey," the drinking habits 
of married women, and much that is vulgar and worse : 

They dye their wools 
With boiUng tinctures, in the ancient style. 
You won't find them, I warrant, in a hurry 
Trying new plans. . . . 
They roast their barley sitting, as of old : 
They on their heads bear burdens, as of old : 
They keep their Thesmophoria, as of old : 
They victimize their husbands, as of old : 
They buy themselves sly dainties, as of old : 
They love their wine unwatered, as of old : ^ 

^ Hemardinquer, La Cyropedie, p. 1 14. 

2 Lysias, xix. 46 ; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 872. Dakyns, vol. iii. 
p. li, cites Plut. Moralia, iii. i, p. 79 (Wytt.), for a chance meeting 
between Ischomachus and Aristippus at Olympia, and a discussion 
about Socrates, which led Aristippus to go to Athens. Of. p. 322. 

^ Ecclesiaziusae, 215, tr. B. B. Rogers. The point about carrying 
things oil their heads was that men did not. Cf. Herodotus, ii. 35, on 



COUNTRY LIFE 345 

and so on. He gives, when it suits him, the vulgar, popular, 
comic view of married women, and sums it up in a proverb : 
" Neither with them — hang them ! — nor without them." ^ 
Apollodorus — not one of the finer spirits of Athens — reminds 
a popular court of the distinctions they all drew : " Hetairai 
we have for pleasure, concubines for daily bodily comfort, 
wives for the production of legitimate children and in order 
to have a reliable guard of one's belongings." ^ in the great 
Funeral Speech Pericles gives his ideal for the Athenian matron 
in a sentence : " If I am to speak of womanly virtues to those 
of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in 
one short admonition : To a woman not to show more weak- 
ness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to be 
talked about for good or evil among men." ^ And then he 
leaves the subject. It was the popular view, but everybody 
knew that it did not represent the ideal of Pericles himself. 
" Silence," said Sophocles in the Ajax, " is a woman's glory " ; 
but, adds Aristotle, '* this is not equally the glory of man." * 

Girls' education hardly existed in the honest homes of 
Athens. *' You married your wife," says Socrates to Crito- 
bulus, *' didn't you ? when she was a very young girl, and 
had seen and heard the very least that was possible ? " ^ And 
Critobulus admits it. " What chance had she of knowing 
anything," says Ischomachus a few pages later of his own 
wife, " when she was not yet fifteen when she came to me, 
and all her life before the utmost care had been taken of 
her, so that she might see as little as possible, hear as little as 
possible, and ask as few questions as possible ? Don't you 
think one should be satisfied if all her knowledge consists in 
knowing how to take wool and make a garment of it, and if 
she has seen how the spinning tasks are assigned to the slave- 
women ? For, as regards the belly and so on, Socrates, she 
had been very well trained — and I think that means a great 
deal in training man or woman." « " How could I help you ? " 

the contrasts of Egypt, where this is reversed. Cf. p. 17. For this 
general character of women, cf. the speaker in Plato, Laws, 781 a, b, 
stealth and dishonesty. 

^ Lysistrata, 1039. oi/re <rvv iravuiKeOpoKTiv ovt tivcv TravcaXeSpcov. 

2 Neaera, 122. ^ Thuc. ii. 45 (Jowett). 

* Sophocles, Ajax, 293 ; Aristotle, Pol. i. 13, n, p. 1260a. 

' Xen. Oecon. 3, 13. • Oecon. 7, 5,6. 



346 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the poor child asks him, " what power have I ? No, it all 
depends on you. My business, my mother said, was to be 
modest." ^ It seems a limited training, even if in addition 
she did pick up a few notions about paint and cosmetics. 

Aristophanes lets us see that sometimes a girl of good family 
came out of doors at one or another public religious function, 
taking part in mysteries she did not imderstand, and sometimes 
perhaps had better not : 

Bore at seven the mystic casket ; 
Was, at ten, our Lady's miller ; 

Then the yellow Brauron bear ; 
Next (a maiden tall and stately 

With a string of figs to wear) 
Bore in pomp the holy Basket. ^ 

Ischomachus says nothing of all this — indeed implies that in 
the case of his wife there had been none of it. 

But it is clear already that, as might have been expected 
in a society where everything was being submitted to question 
and remodelled by reason, the doubt was expressed whether 
this training of girls was sufficient or even right at all — whether 
the type of woman it bred was all that could be made of the 
material — whether a wife had best be secluded, dull and un- 
companionable (" Is there anybody," asks Socrates, " to whom 
you entrust more serious matters than to your wife — or to 
whom you talk less ? " ^) — whether the wife might not be as 
well educated and as companionable as the hetaira. And 
then it would seem that more fundamental questions still 
were asked, for all those so far mentioned imply that woman 
is a sort of adjunct to man, a complementary nature. Is 
woman really a mere complement to man ? What is her 
^uo-t9, seeing that to-day in Athens everybody talks about 
Nature — what is woman's nature ? The parodies of Aristo- 
phanes of this feminist movement, the sympathetic interest 
in it shown by Plato, the very care and seriousness with which 

^ Oecon. 7, 14, o-axppove'iv — it has the two suggestions of chaste 
and sensible. Ischomachus in reply takes up the latter. 

2 Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 641, B. B. Rogers. *• Yellow" because 
she wore a saffron robe, crowded out by exigencies of English verse. 
What even domestic rites might be is shown in Acharnians, 241 ff. 

3 Oecon. 3, 12. 



COUNTRY LIFE 347 

Aristotle refutes the doctrine that man's nature and woman's 
are the same,i show ahke how much in earnest the people were 
who raised the questions. " Well," says Socrates, as he watches 
the dancing-girl twirling and catching hoops as she dances, ^ 
" the girl shows that woman's nature is no worse than man's. 
So any one of you who has a wife may boldly teach her to be 
what he wishes of her." " And what," asks Antisthenes in 
his ad hominem way, " what of Xanthippe, of women past, 
present, and future, most crabbed and curst ? " Socrates has 
a ready answer ; but then the girl starts somersaults into and 
out of a hoop set with swords, and Socrates returns to his point 
that courage can be taught — if a woman can learn it like this. 
And Antisthenes suggests that the Syracusan, her owner, 
might exhibit the girl to the whole city (for a fee) and teach 
all the Athenians the art of facing the spears of the enemy 
at close quarters. So in earnest and in jest the question is 
debated ; and even Aristophanes, who makes game of the 
movement, contrives absent-mindedly to put on his stage — 
he does it twice — a woman capable of broad outlook and wide 
interests, equal to forming large plans, to starting and con- 
trolling a great organization, able to speak well and sensibly 
of woman's contribution to the state ^ — but of course it is all 
fun and nonsense, and he ends off his plays in frolic and obscene 
absurdities — which proves how ridiculous the whole thing is. 
But Plato and Antisthenes did not think it ridiculous, and they 
were, each in his own way, ready to remodel human life 
from top to bottom on the basis of the equality of the sexes. 

Plato in the Fifth Book of his Republic is quite explicit 
as to what an ideal society requires in this matter of woman's 
education, and he does not shrink from what follows. He does 
not recognize any fundamental difference between men and 
women except sex. Dogs, male and female, are used alike in 
hunting — the males are stronger, it is true, but huntsmen 
do not regard the rearing of puppies as labour enough for the 
females (451 d). Is there any pursuit or art of civic life in 
regard to which the nature of a woman differs from a man's 
nature ? (455 a). " Need I waste time in speaking of the art 
of weaving, and the management of pancakes and preserves, 

* See Ivo Bruns, Frauenemanzipation, in Vortrdge u. Aufsdtze. 

'^ Xen. Symp. 2, 8-13. * liitl[iQLysistrataQ.n6.t\ieEcclesiazusae. 



348 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

in which womankind does really appear to be great, and in 
which for her to be beaten by a man is of all things the most 
absurd ? " (4550) .^ So much for woman's sphere ; a woman 
as well as a man may be a physician, a musician, a philosopher, 
or have a turn for gymnastic and military exercises. If the 
difference consists only in the woman bearing and the man 
begetting, this does not amount to a proof that the education 
for both should not be the same (454E). And Plato would 
give them the same education — music, gymnastic, and the art 
of war (452 a), though he expects that shallow wits will find 
something ridiculous in the sight of women naked in the 
palaestra, wrestling with men — especially if they are old and 
wrinkled (452B) ; still it is only a matter of custom. When he has 
once established this equality of sexes, he proceeds to his famous 
community of wives and the abolition of the family. Women 
will still be allowed to suckle the babies, it would seem, but care 
will be taken that none of them knows which is her own. 

What the women thought of the established order — or 
what they would have thought of Plato's plan — was not 
inquired. Plato was not less indifferent to the likes and dis- 
likes of individuals than the most conservative traditionalist 
of his day. Euripides, however, in his Medea ^ puts in unmis- 
takeable language the feelings of some of the women. Of all 
things, says Medea, that have life and understanding woman 
is the most miserable. It is money that makes marriage — ^and 
the man is lord of her body, whoever he is ; good or bad, she 
cannot refuse him. She knows nothing whatever of what he 
will be, when she leaves her home. If she manages herself 
well, and he lives with her content, her lot is happy ; if not, 
she had better die. The man can find satisfaction outside, 
if he is unhappy at home ; not she. But she has a quiet life 
at home, free from peril, and he must face the ranks of spear- 
men ! Fools ! I had rather thrice face battle, shield on arm, 
than once bear a child. Euripides was counted among the 
ancients a hater of woman,^ and certainly his characters say 
a good deal against the sex.* But it is one thing to recognize 

^ Jowett's translation. 2 Euj-. Medea, 230-251. 

® Aristophanes, r/i(5sm. 383-458. 

* See Decharme, Euripide et V esprit de son tMatre, pp. 133 ff., for a 
discussion of this — a. rather trivial treatment of it, though there is 



COUNTRY LIFE 349 

that woman's lot is hard or even unjust — another thing to 
enjoy the emancipated type,^ ill-trained to begin with, and 
not better balanced now for a sudden swing to another ex- 
treme, the victim of theories and fancies, nationalist, in- 
dividualist, anarchist. 

But let us turn from this babel to the quiet house at Scillus 
or the house of Ischomachus, whichever it is. " Greek love- 
poetry," it has been said by a modem scholar, the author of a 
brilliant book on Greek genius, *' is not the love-poetry of the 
Brownings,'' 2 and it is difficult to imagine what Ischomachus 
or his chronicler would have made of a passage that began : 

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird, 
And all a wonder and a wild desire. 

Their wives rather probably could not read or write. None of 
them, one can believe, would have seen much in the Vita 
Nuova ; and perhaps they would have preferred something 
simpler to the Phaedrus. Ischomachus did not consciously 
marry in order " to realize himself " like a modern philosopher, 
nor like the plain man of to-day because he ** liked the girl." 
It was rather a well-thought-out selection of a partner, for 
reasons financial, social, and what we might call eugenic. He 
tells her quite frankly that they are partners, and very quickly 
gets down to business. But he does it with tenderness and 
grace — she was only fourteen, he tells Socrates ; and his words 
imply that he thought of her as a shy little wild bird, for he 
waited, he said, " till she was tamed and would come to his 
hand." ^ He and her parents, he told her, had been seeking 
the same thing — the best possible partner in house and 
children ; and so he had chosen her, and her parents had 
chosen him.. 

Ischomachus now explains to his wife how they can help 
each other. He does not quote Plato to her and formally 
disavow his ideas, but modern readers and perhaps ancient 
readers have thought that Xenophon had Plato in mind. For 

something in his remark (on p. 154) that Greek woman by training 
and social conditions was in fact beneath Greek man. 

1 Cf. Hippolytus, 640. 

2 R. W. Livingstone, Greek Genius, pp. 81, 82. 

^ Oecon. 7, 10, eVet rjhrj fxot x^'-porjBrjs rfv <aX eTfTiBdcrevTO cucttc diaXeyeaOat, 
If my rendering is too sentimental, Liddell and Scott's Lexicon does 
not fail in that way. 



350 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

it is explained to the little wife ^ that the gods had thought out 
their device very carefully when they made the pair called 
male and female — with intent that both should have the utmost 
good and comfort out of their fellowship. There are children 
to produce — to keep the race from dying out, and to look after 
their parents in old age. Man again is not like the animal — 
the instinct that developed the house has altered everything. 
God made the man's body to bear heat and cold and hardship, 
the outdoor things, and to the woman he gave the duties 
of home, the care of the babies he put into her very nature, and 
" gave her a larger gift of loving babies than he did to the 
man " (7, 24). God gave them both memory and carefulness, 
for the common good of both — it would be hard to say which 
has most of these. And just because their natures are not 
every way alike, they need each other more. What God has 
ordained, custom has established ; and, what is more, God's 
laws implanted in nature maintain themselves and avenge 
themselves. So he tells his wife she is to be the queen bee in 
their hive ; for the queen bee keeps all the others busy, knows 
all they do, safeguards and manages all that is stored up, 
sees to the " weaving " of the cells and the nurture of the 
young, and when the time comes sends forth the swarm. 
" Shall I have to do all this ? " she asks. Yes, he tells her, and 
adds like a man, that there is another duty too, one she may 
not like — if any of the slaves fall sick, she will have to nurse 
them and tend them till they are well. " By Zeus," says the 
little wife, " I shall like that best of all — if they will be grateful 
for it and be friendlier than before." " I was delighted at 
her answer," Ischomachus tells Socrates.^ 

A French critic asks, with some humour, if Ischomachus in 
all this talk with Socrates has not the air of revealing to us a 
new discovery — that woman can be intelligent, that the gods 
have given her memory and other faculties. ^ There have been 
witty women who have held that this has always been to men 
a startling discovery, that it still is. The main point of 
interest, however, is the attitude of Xenophon to the marriage 
question. He holds, as Dr. Adam says/ " the orthodox Greek 

1 Oecon. 7, 18 £f., ttoKv dua-Kfuixevoas. ^ Oecofi. 7, },y, 38. 

^ Masqueray, Euripide et ses idSes, p. 301. 
* Note on Plato, Rep. v. 453. 



COUNTRY LIFE 351 

view '' on the subject. The critic's words suggest some limita- 
tion of outlook in Xenophon, as if the view were outgrown. 
It was the view to which Aristotle recurred ; affection, he 
said, would be " watery " in that Republic of Plato's — there 
would be no reason for any so-called father there caring for his 
so-called son, for " what is common to the greatest number 
has the least care bestowed upon it " ; it would be better 
to be somebody's real cousin than a son after this fashion ; 
** and there is another point that we must not ignore, that 
long time and the experience of years deserves attention." ^ 
On this last reflection a famous German scholar cries out as 
being ** somewhat rhetorical," as being '' the standing and 
staple argument of all conservative minds against subversive 
innovations — an argument which appeals to us, with our 
greatly extended ethnographic and historical perspective, 
far less forcibly than to past generations." ^ Yes, but here 
the ethnographic and historical perspective more and more 
confirms Xenophon and Aristotle as the marriage customs 
and experience of races and ages are made known to us. 
How much better indeed to be even a cousin of somebody 
than live in that loveless machine-made hell of a Republic ! 
How much better, Aristotle suggests in his Ethics, to be the 
real husband or wife of somebody ! " Friendship {<l>Ckla) 
between man and woman seems established in nature ; for 
man by nature is more apt to form such a union of two than a 
state, for a household comes before a state and is more funda- 
mental ; while procreation is a faculty shared with the animals. 
With all other beings this is the limit of their association. 
Human beings live together not only for the production of 
children, but for all the purposes of life. -As soon as man 
and woman unite, a distribution of functions (or tasks epr^a) 
takes place ; some are proper to the man, some to the woman ; 
hence they help each other, each contributing their own gifts. 
Thus it is that use and pleasure are both found in this friend- 

^ These sentences come from the Politics, ii., between pp. 1261b 
and 1264a; in order from c. 4, 7 ; c. 3, 4 ; c. 3, 7 ; c. 5, 
16. 

2 Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, iii. 120. It is curious how to some 
minds Tr)v ^Tpvfxodapov Qparrav Karayiyapria-at suggests progress and 
emancipation. 



352 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

ship . . . and children are an additional bond of union 
between them/' ^ 

All this is very useful and philosophical, it may be said, 
but to-day we look for more enthusiasm, more passion, in these 
things — some element of romance ; we find it in Euripides ; 
Ischomachus seems too well balanced for a modern lover. 
Perhaps modern lovers could do with more balance. But this 
element of romance appears with surprising power in another 
work of Xenophon's, which was read a great deal more between 
the Renaissance and the French Revolution than it is to-day. 
The heroines of the Cyropaedeia are married women — pre- 
sumably married with as little personal choice as the wife of 
Ischomachus. Cyrus warns his young Median friend Araspas 
that fire and passion are not things to play with ; ^ Araspas 
believes love to be voluntary ; a matter of choice, of the will 
— and he finds somehow that he has no choice ; Pantheia is 
so beautiful and so gracious. ^ But Pantheia's love and passion 
are all for Abradatas, her husband, absent or present, living or 
dead. And we seem to be in the presence of one of Homer's 
women, beautiful, loyal, and womanly — till she slays herself 
over Abradatas' body, and we realize that we are in the age of 
Euripides. Till one knows the love story of Abradatas and 
Pantheia, it is premature to say that Xenophon does not 
understand passion. One of the surprising things about him 
is the number of fields of literature where he is a pioneer, and 
perhaps no one would have guessed that the author of the 
Anabasis would give Greece perhaps its first, and perhaps also 
its best, romance. Nor is Pantheia the only lady of romance 
in his pages. " So when they got home," we read, " they 
talked of Cyrus — one of his wisdom, another of his endurance, 
of his gentleness another, and there was one who spoke of 
his beauty and his height. And then Tigranes asked his wife : 
What do you say, Armenia, did you think him beautiful ? 
No, by Zeus, she said, I wasn't looking at him. Not at Cyrus ? 
he said ; at whom then ? At him, she said, who offered his 
own life to save me from slavery ; " and that was Tigranes.* 
In the Symposium,^ too, we read of passionate attachment 
between the Homeric enthusiast, Niceratos, and his wife — per- 

1 Ethics, viii. 12, 7, p. 1161 a. ^ Cyrop, vii. i, 4-17. 

3 Cyrop. vii. i, 18. * Cyrop. iii. i, 41. ^ Symp. 8, 3. 



COUNTRY LIFE 353 

haps that Homeric education, of which we heard, did make 
a kalos kdgathos of a man on this side of Hfe, too. Cyrus 
himself, in the story — a deviation of some significance perhaps 
from Persian practice — has only one wife, his cousin — " she 
whom you often carried in your arms, when you were a boy 
in our house ; and whenever anyone asked her whom she 
would marry, it was always Cyrus '* ^ — and she herself crowns 
him, a scene almost mediaeval in tone.^ 

The Greeks were quite frank in stating that the object of 
marriage ^ — though, Aristotle says, not the only one — is the 
production of children. Xenophon himself is our authority 
for the remarkable usages of Sparta in this matter — the re- 
laxation of monogamy between friends in order to the pro- 
creation of big and healthy children ; but what he thought of 
it seems indicated in his conclusion. " About the production 
of children such was the legislation of Lycurgus, the very anti- 
thesis of all other peoples, and whether it has produced for 
Sparta men of greater height and greater strength, let him who 
will inquire for himself.'* Much as he admired Spartan 
discipline, it looks as if he was critical at this point. His own 
feeling is shown in the words he attributes to Socrates, when 
the old man is explaining to his son how much a home owes 
to the mother — on the care a man takes of his pregnant wife 
who is carrying his children, and the forethought he exercises 
for the unborn, and on the mother's weariness and risk of 
life, on her care of the baby when it comes, not because of any 
good it has done her, not as if it knew who its friend was or 
could say what it wanted ; she has to guess herself what will 
help it and please it, and so the labour of years begins and 
goes on without any knowledge that there will be any return 
for it. " And how much annoyance do you think you have 
given her from babyhood up, in voice and actions, and peevish- 
ness ? and how much pain, too, when you have been sick ? " * 
The man who writes in this way knows — and it is only ex- 
perience that gives the knowledge — the value of family life. 
Even if he is didactic, it is clear that he has learnt from his wife, 



^ Cyrop. viii. 5, 19. "^ Cf . H6mardinquer, La CyropSdie, p. 126. 
^Aristotle, Pol. vii. 16, 5-10, p. 1335a, on the ages within which 
men and women are best adapted to this end, 
* Mem. ii. 2, 5-7. 
23 



354 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and found that she has lessons to teach him that outweigh 
some of Plato's. The house at Scillus shows a side of Greek 
life and character not much emphasized in the books ancient 
or modern, yet full of significance. Homes were homes, even 
if Pericles and Aristophanes emphasized other things than 
mere affection of married people and their commonplace 
interest in the new baby. Plutarch in a later day shows us 
Greek life at Chaeroneia, and Dio Chrysostom among the 
squatters on Euboea, very much from the same angle as 
Xenophon. 

The wife of Ischomachus only appears, we have to re- 
member, in the fragments of her conversation which her hus- 
band quotes to Socrates, but it is possible to see some char- 
acter in her. If she was very carefully screened from the 
world in her mother's home, it would seem she learnt no evil 
there — she is pure and gentle and kind-hearted. She answers 
her husband now and again with spirit — and it delights him. 
She makes him think well of women. She told him he was 
wrong if he supposed he was laying a task on her in giving her 
charge of the household — not to have such a charge would 
trouble her more. " I suppose," he says to Socrates, " it 
comes naturally to a good woman to prefer to take care of her 
children rather than neglect them, and in the same way to take 
care of possessions too, whose charm lies in their being one's 
own." ^ When, as a young Greek girl might, she got herself 
up with powder and rouge and high heels, a iew words from 
him led her to see there was a kind of falsity in it ; and, seeing 
in a flash what it was she liked in him, she was done with 
such vanities for ever.^ After this it is amazing to find the 
great Cyrus tolerant of drugs to make the eye bright and 
other little devices to improve the complexion. ^ That 
Napoleon III used rouge at Sedan with a purpose is another 
thing. The little wife, however, ventured to ask Ischomachus 
if he could suggest anything to improve her looks,* and he 
suggested activity in all her duties ; it would mean appetite, 
and thence would come health and good complexion. A life 
of sitting still in dignity was fatal to good looks. ^ 

1 Oecon. 9, 18-19. 2 Oecon. 10, 2-8. 

' Cyrop. viii. i, 41. * Oecon. 10, 9. 

^ Croiset, Xenophon, p. 176, says the passage reminds the reader of 



COUNTRY LIFE 355 

The chapter on tidiness, one feels, takes the reader right 
into the household at Scillus. Ischomachus, we read, came 
home and asked for something or other, and his wife blushed 
all over and was evidently troubled. She did not know 
where it was. So a discourse follows, which, we may be sure, 
was often heard at Scillus on the advantages of order. Think 
of a chorus and what order means there — or an army, and 
Ischomachus is quite carried away, till if dates allowed we 
could believe he had travelled with the Ten Thousand himself 
— ^hoplites all in rank, cavalry, light-armed, bowmen, slingers — 
tens of thousands of them all in rank, advancing in silence 
— or a ship of war, and this sets Ischomachus off on another 
series of reminiscences of the great Phoenician merchant ship 
in the most incredible good order, with everything conceivable 
that a ship would want stowed with consummate neatness 
in the smallest possible compass, and the steersman* s mate 
knew where every single thing was, could lay his hand on it 
in an instant, as easily as you could spell Socrates, and would 
refresh his memory by inspection to see that all was handy — 
** for, when God sends a tempest, you can't go looking for 
things. God threatens and chastens stupid people.'* Yes, 
he told his wife all about the ship and enforced the lesson — 
" how beautiful it looks " — let us pause to recall what we 
know of the great word kalos and all it carries of beauty and 
moral worth and grandeur—" how beautiful it looks when 
the boots and shoes are all set out in order, whatever size 
and shape they are." And with this inimitable and character- 
istic sentence we may perhaps leave the training of the wife 
of Ischomachus, for it was, as we know, successful. Perhaps 
it is easier to train a paper wife than a real one. At least, 
it has been said that the beauty of people in books is that 
you can shut the book, and people in books can be very 
charming and obHging. 

If we smile now and then as we listen to Ischomachus, 
we must not lose sight of the value of the book. Life might 
be very hard for a little Athenian wife, and Xenophon urged 
that by kindness and courtesy and good-humour a husband 
could do a great deal to win that love and confidence which 

those statues of Phidias in whose remains even yet " Hfe and strength 
shine with sovereign beauty." 



356 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

make a marriage happy. No doubt tidiness helps in this, 
but then it is only one aspect of that consideration for others, 
which Xenophon says Socrates always taught, and which he 
preaches himself on many a pleasant page. 

Of Xenophon' s own wife we only know what Diogenes 
Laertius quotes from Demetrius of Magnesia, and it is a 
curious sentence. When Xenophon went to Scillus " there 
followed him — or went with him — a wife too, called Philesia.'* ^ 
The verb is peculiar — it may imply that she came from Asia ; 
and the noun is odd — ^vvaiov. The word is used in Attic 
affectionately and contemptuously — in Aristophanes it might 
be both — " wifie." If she was a foreigner, Xenophon could 
not have contracted a legal Athenian marriage with her, which 
might perhaps help to explain why he settled in Corinth after 
471. It suggests a question, too, of wide bearing : By what 
law or laws were those increasingly numerous Greeks married 
whom we find in every city of the Mediterranean and of the 
kingdoms of Alexander's successors ? Marriage laws must have 
differed endlessly in the old Greek cities ; what form did the 
general '' law of Nature " take in the new foundations ? 

When we come to Xenophon' s sons we seem to be on 
firmer ground. ^ They were two, and apparently twins, for 
they were called the Dioscuri. ^ One of them lived to serve 
and fall in the Athenian ranks at Mantineia in 362. This 
was Gryllos, and his gallant death and his father's name 
called attention to him, and Aristotle is quoted as the authority 
for the fact that very many men wrote encomiums and epitaphs 
on him — *' partly for his father's sake," a clause which it is 
pleasant to read. The other son, Diodorus, was less dis- 
tinguished ; in later days he had a son called Xenophon 
whose sole distinction, a slight one, seems to have been that 
he was prosecuted on some charge or other by somebody. 

No one can doubt that Xenophon must have rejoiced in 
having sons. At all events, no Greek writer, who has reached 
us, took such trouble or showed such sympathy in drawing 

1 Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 8, § 52. 

2 On this, Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 8-10, §§ 52-55. 

3 The name Diodorus makes this almost certain — at least for those 
who know the evidence on twin cults and practices relative to twins, 
collected by Dr. Rendel Harris. 



COUNTRY LIFE 357 

the character of a natural boy. There is nothing in Greek 
literature that approaches the boy C5n:us in the first book of 
the Cyropaedeia ; the only thing like it is the actual letter 
of a boy, Theon, found of late years among papyri.^ Cyrus 
is drawn as a manly, natural little fellow — full of spirit and 
observation and friendliness, quite at home with people and 
modest too — " perhaps he was a bit of a chatterbox," adds 
Xenophon, and explains that as partly due to his education — 
for he had to be ready to give a reason for whatever he did — 
and he was keen on understanding things, and used to ask 
questions. He was a shrewd little lad, and always ready with 
an answer. *' But all his chattering left the impression not 
of forwardness, but of simplicity and warm-heartedness, so 
that one would sooner listen to him than sit and have him 
silent." The man who wrote that passage evidently loved 
boys, and as evidently meant to bring Socratic principles into 
the education of his own. 

We are told that Agesilaos suggested he should send his 
boys to Sparta to be trained, ^ and he clearly liked many 
features in the Spartan training. The boys grew up manly 
and modest, they knew how to behave in the streets, their 
whole deportment spoke of discipline — and it showed that 
the male sex is as capable as the female, more capable in fact, 
of sobriety and quietness, for here were boys whom you found 
more bashful than girls ^ — and yet physically hard and fit — 
quite unlike the impudent young Athenians whom Isocrates 
describes.* Probably Xenophon had reasons for keeping his 
boys near him which he did not tell Agesilaos. An exile was 
always and everywhere an exile ; nothing had the stamp of 
permanence on it in Greece at that time ; and as the seaman 
said to Ischomachus, '* You can't go looking for things in a 
storm." The storm broke in 371, and Xenophon hurried his 
sons, with a few slaves, off to Lepreon southward, escaping 

^ G. Milligan, Selections from the Greek Papyri, No. 42, from Grenfell 
and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, i. p. 185 f. ; and Deissmann, Light from 
the Ancient East. 

2 Plut. Agesilaus, 20. ' Lac. Resp. 3, 4-5. 

* Isocrates, Areop. 48-49. On the other hand, Isocrates notices 
that the Spartans are so wanting in education and culture ((/)tXoo-o0ias) 
that they do not even learn their letters {Panath. 209) . The author of 
Hippias Major, 285 c, says not many of them can count, cos enos elTrelv. 



358 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

hmself northward to Elis, and joining them at Lepreon as 
soon as he could ; and then, as we saw, they all got off to 
Corinth. 

Discipline, order, and the Socratic method were the founda- 
tions of the upbringing his boys had, of that we may be sure — 
and hunting. Xenophon believed that training is the secret 
of sound mind and sound body — aa-Kelv is his word.^ All 
that is honourable or good in a man depends on practice — 
aaK7}Ta — self-control {(rax^poavvrj) most of all. He believed 
with Theognis, a rather old-fashioned and aristocratic poet : ^ 

Good from the good thou'lt learn ; but comrades base 
What sense thou hast, are certain to efface. 

Could courage be taught ? Here he falls back on Socrates. 
Socrates, he says, recognized great differences of natural endow- 
ment in regard to courage, but held that here also training tells. 
The Macedonians a generation later bore down the Greeks — a 
nation of hunters triumphant over a race of athletes. Xeno- 
phon's passion for hunting was no doubt helped by his recogni- 
tion of the training that hunting in the wild carried with it — 
observation, patience, cunning, the gift of knowing your quarry 
and its ways and nature, unflagging energy, and interest 
always alert. As we have seen, his boys hunted — and *' men 
who wished hunted with them " ^ ; one man, for certain, we can 
guess. '' Even when I was a little boy," says Pheraulas, a 
Persian of the people,* " I would snatch up a hunting-knife 
whenever I saw one ; and it was nobody, but just nature, I 
maintain, that taught me how to hold it. I wasn't taught 
to do it ; they used to try to prevent me ; but it was like some 
other things that nature set me doing, in spite of my father and 
mother. By Zeus, I used to hack with that knife — everything 
I could get a chance at. It wasn't merely natural, like walking 
and running — it was fun, splendid fun I thought it." The 
parents, of course, were on the side of safety, but one of them 
had a quiet satisfaction of his own when he caught Gryllos 
with the hunting-knife ; he must put it down, of course ; but — 
he'll make a hunter. And he did. And if, like Pheraulas, the 
boy had a natural handiness with his fists — they need not always 

1 Mem. i. 2, 19, and 23. 2 Theognis, 35, 36. 

* Anab. v. 3, 10. * Cyrop. ii. 3, 7-10. 



3 



COUNTRY LIFE 359 

be used on Diodorus. This seems to be brought out by a 
chapter in the Memorabilia, where two brothers (with twin-like 
names) disagree, and Socrates talks to one of them about 
friendship between brothers — you two are like a pair of hands 
made by God to help each other ; and two brothers are a much 
more useful pair than a pair of hands or a pair of eyes.^ Brothers 
must be special friends. Probably the family knew this story 
well, and the other story about Socrates teaching his son to be 
gentle with his mother ^ — '* even if her tongue did make you 
wish yourself dead." Manners, too, were watched — Socrates 
had^ spoken of table manners from time to time, of the con- 
sideration that is due to others in this matter, of tolerance for 
bad manners in others, of the art of putting up with things — 
" just think that you are perhaps harder to please than the 
slaves." Xenophon, like Alexander after him, was impressed 
with the manners and breeding of the Persian gentleman, and 
recommended them with an explicitness that moves a smile. ^ 
With all this we have to remember that the grave, stately, and 
strict father, with all his stories of Socrates, could tell other 
stories — nobody like him — thrilling stories of battle and 
adventure, such as made Plutarch centuries later say that he 
all but shows you the actual thing, till you feel you are in the 
thick of it, your heart beating, sharing the danger, so vivid it 
all is.* And sometimes the tales gleamed with fun, when he 
told of King Seuthes and his Thracian suppers, or of Cyrus and 
the butler. 

" No," says Ischomachus to Socrates, " I did not begin to 
teach my wife before I sacrificed and prayed that for me 
teaching and her taught all might turn out for the best." 
" And did your wife join with you in these sacrifices and 
prayers ? " " Why, yes ; she did, with many a prayer to the 
gods that she might become what she ought to be." ^ These 
simple sentences show how that piety, shown by Xenophon 
in every emergency on the march through Asia, finds a place in 
the more ordinary and everyday affairs of Scillus. The Memo- 

1 Mem. ii. 3, 1-19. Cf. also Cyvop. viii. 7, 14-16. 

2 Mem. ii. 2, 1-14. 

^ Cyrop. V. 2, 17; and viii. i, 42, on spitting, blowing the nose, 
staring. 

* Pint. Artax. 8, on Cunaxa. * Oecon. 7, 7-8. 



36o FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

rabilia are full of the same thought of the goodness and kindness 
of the gods and man's duty to wait on them. In Xenophon's 
story of the greater Cyrus, it has been pointed out, there is no 
jealous Nemesis waiting to crush greatness because it is great. ^ 
Cyrus is loyal to heaven, and heaven is loyal to him — t}aat is 
all. It is a simple faith, and one which has made men great. 
Xenophon will go to the gods in the great perplexities of the 
march, and in the little affairs of crops and cattle. ^ He would 
not have been so hard upon " the noble Hesiod " as some of 
his fellow-students were, according to Plato in the Republic ; ^ 
it would have seemed quite natural to him that bees and sheep 
and other blessings should be multiplied to the righteous, and 
he believed he had Socrates with him in this conviction. 
Shallow natures hold this faith, but they sometimes lose it 
when Eleians recapture Scillus ; deeper ones have held it, too, 
and not lost it. And when it comes to the last and greatest 
difficulty of all, '* for my part, my sons, I have never yet been 
persuaded that the soul, so long as it is in a mortal body, lives, 
and when it leaves it, dies ; for I see that it is the presence of the 
soul within them that makes these mortal bodies live. Nor 
could anyone ever persuade me that the soul loses sense when 
it leaves the senseless body ; no, but when it is let loose, un- 
mingled and pure, I think it must be then that it reaches its 
highest wisdom. . . . Even if it is not so, if the soul lingers 
and dies with the body, yet fear the gods who abide for ever, 
who see all, whose is all power, who uphold this universe 
undiminished, ageless, unerring, unspeakable for its beauty 
and grandeur — fear them and do nothing impious or un- 
holy, no, nor think it. And after the gods, respect mankind, 
the whole race of men new every generation. ... I have been 
a lover of men all my life." So says the dying Cyrus, and the 
thoughts are Xenophon's. 

The Greek household, beside parents and children, con- 
tained slaves, and they might be many. We are told that a 
Spartan friend sent Xenophon a lot of captives from Dardanus, 
when he was settled at Scillus. Ischomachus accordingly 
has a good deal to say about them. They shirked, stole, drank, 
and struck up irregular unions. One of the wife's duties was 
to see " that the slaves do not breed without our leave," though 
1 Hemardinquer, La Cyropedie, 286. ^ Oecon. 5, 20. ' Rep. ii. 363 a. 



COUNTRY LIFE 361 

Ischomachus (like Aristotle later on) saw that to have children 
of their own made good slaves more loyal at once.^ That is his 
line throughout — treat the slave like a human being, teach 
him — if you can teach dogs to fetch and carry and turn somer- 
saults, you can teach men and women — trust him and be good 
to him, and let him see that you are just, and he will be your 
friend and play fair by you.^ The same discovery was made 
by some masters of negroes in the Southern States in days 
before the war, who said they never had trouble with their 
negroes, and that they did not run away.^ Slavery, as Homer 
and Euripides saw, kills personality, but Ischomachus saw that 
it paid to keep it alive, even if kindliness were not a motive with 
him. This gives a strange look to the defence of the eunuch 
system put into the mouth of the great Cyrus,* who in this case 
for once treats men simply as tools. It is not quite in character, 
but the passage may be an apology for an Oriental practice, 
which the Greeks did not like, and which they might think 
a blot on the hero's nature. The defence fails and rather 
emphasizes the blot. Ischomachus is a great deal shrewder 
and more humane. 

A large part of the Oeconomicus is taken up with farming — 
clearly a theme in which Xenophon was interested deeply, 
but here we need not perhaps follow him. It will be more 
interesting to ask what library he had at Scillus, for it is plain 
that he read a great deal in his years there and at Corinth — 
and not merely old books, but new ones. For it has been brought 
out that he read Plato's dialogues as they appeared ; he knew 
more or less what Antisthenes was doing in books; and he 
read and studied Isocrates. Isocrates and he had belonged 
to the same deme, they were about the same age, and they 
may have known each other as boys. Their tastes were widely 
different — one can hardly imagine Isocrates hunting or riding 
over a farm — still less among the Kurds and the snow. But 
Xenophon, it has been noticed, is curiously susceptible to 
style, and when Isocrates in 373 struck out a new path in 
literature with his Evagoras, Xenophon realized its significance, 

1 Oecon. 9, 5. Of. Aristotle, Oecon. i. 5. 

2 Oecon. chapters 12 to 14 generally. 

' Booker Washington, Story of the Negro. 
* Cyrop. vii. 5, 60-65. 



362 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

and traces of its influence have been noticed in others of his 
books and not in the Agesilaos alone. Of the many books 
he wrote, constant use has been made in this and the preceding 
chapters. The fashion in education has taken us elsewhere 
to-day, not always to our advantage. If what has been 
written here will send any reader back to Xenophon's own 
pages, he will find what we have lost by neglecting one of the 
strongest, sanest, most wholesome, and delightful writers of 
ancient Greece. 



CHAPTER XII 
UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 

THERE are points in history where Imagination loves 
to rest— great battles that alter the face of the world 
or turn for ever the current of mankind's thinking — 
great discoveries like those of Columbus and his contemporaries 
which change every factor in human affairs by bringing in 
new ones of vaster scope — great men who sum up a nation's 
life or the spirit of a people and an epoch in themselves, or, 
by the questions they raise, or the forces of personality which 
they liberate or evoke, give humanity new outlook and new 
insight. In the story of the Greek race three moments stand 
out— one a battle of a few hours fought and won at Salamis, 
the second the fifteen years of the rule of Pericles, the third 
the short reign of Alexander— and all of them fall within the 
brief period of a hundred and sixty years. Pericles and 
Alexander are names that stand for ideas utterly divergent, 
and two generations span the interval between the men. 

Every age is an age of transition, but somehow in few does 
the transition seem so swift and so complete as here. We 
pass to a new world, with wider horizons than men ever dreamed 
could be. Every value we have learnt in politics, in philo- 
sophy, in religion, in everything, is revised, and often, it would 
seem, inverted. Democracy loses its empire and is relegated, 
like a disgraced pasha in modern Turkey, to the control of a 
parish. Monarchy and chivalry are in the ascendant, and 
never more brilliant. New cities rise, which, without knowing 
it, negate everything it was supposed a city should be. The 
great philosophers are still busy with their ideal states, which 
are now further from realization than the Bird City of Aristo- 
phanes ; and mankind turns for practical guidance to other 
teachers who care little for the state and a great deal for the 
universe and the individual. In religion, disguised mono- 

363 



3^4 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

theisms begin to capture the minds of serious men with a new 
appeal ; and the old cults of the city-gods survive for old ac- 
quaintance' sake, and interest not the pious but the antiquaries. 
All this in a century ! Sparta launched war upon the Greek 
world to win the freedom of every Greek town and city ; she 
crushed Athens and carried off a victory she little deserved ; 
and in half a century all Greece is controlled by kings, and all 
the freedom the cities in general keep is to plan their streets 
and mismanage their finances. Where the city is built round 
a fortress, it is a different story, chequered with uneven dashes 
of freedom and slavery. To this end had autopolitanism, if 
such a word may be developed,— the passionate demand for 
local independence to the utmost,— brought its votaries. 

The war-cry with which a nation embarks upon a war may 
have little relation to the facts of the world ; it may be a mere 
chimera, a madness— like that " passion " that sent Athens 
to Sicily— or a fancy fetched from a dead-and-gone past— or a 
catchword without real meaning but with an appeal, ready 
and compulsive, for those who do not think. Did Sparta ever 
mean to make all Greeks "citizens of themselves," every 
Greek city a law to itself ? The smaller cities thought so, 
hoped so, and fought to win this freedom. But Salamis long 
before had marked the close of the era in which their fancies 
lived. Fifty years and more of the rule of Athens, years of 
progress all over the world, had made impossible such a return 
to the days before Salamis. New ideals, new necessities, new 
nations, a new balance of powers had come in, and there could 
be no going back. The Peloponnesian War altered much and 
it left problems, the first glance at which would show any 
thinking man that the war-cry of the victors was a cry for the 
impossible and the undesirable. 

Three things stand out in the situation of the Greek peoples 
at the end of the Peloponnesian War. First of all, there is 
the fact perpetually emphasized by the commercial advisers 
of Athens, that Athens is in the middle of the world. This 
was true, for the known world, and the civilized world, now 
extended almost as far to the West, as hitherto to the East 
and to the South. Eighty years of Athenian trade Westward, 
forty or fifty years of internal peace in Asia Minor, the unity 
of the old empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt under the peace- 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 365 

ful control of Persia, must have added in a degree incalculable 
to us to the population and the wealth of the whole world, both 
East and West, but especially Westward. The historians 
have chronicled the wars for us, — short wars and local wars, 
though there were too many of them, — ^but have they 
emphasized enough the significance to mankind of the cessation 
of Assyrian raiding, the opening and settlement of the western 
shores of the Mediterranean, and the steady movements of 
commerce over a very great sea freer than ever before from 
pirates and vastly more familiar to mariner and pilot ? The 
rise of great cities like Syracuse and Carthage, Capua and 
Massilia, the trading energies of the Carthaginian, the Etruscan, 
and the Greek on every western shore with a hinterland — every- 
thing points to a new Western world that must react on the 
Aegaean, yes, and on the Euxine, and on the Levant generally. 
The West grows richer and richer in men and cities, industries, 
arts, and gold and silver. If there had been no changes what- 
ever in the cities and islands of old Greece and Ionia, the re- 
action of this great new West must have been felt ; but there 
were great changes in the ancient homes of the race. 

In the next place, it is safe to say that the war left every 
Greek state (with the exception, perhaps, of Thebes) weaker in 
many ways. Twenty-seven years taken from industry and 
given to destruction did not increase the national wealth. 
The losses of life were enormous, and the loss of energy and 
hope and spirit in the peoples is hardly to be computed. 
Sparta, it might be urged, came out of the war stronger — she 
gained empire and she had amassed stores of gold ^ so great 
as to make conservative Spartans uneasy. The power of a 
single Spartan had never been greater.^ But Sparta had lost 
men, and there was no way of replacing them — she could not 
and she would not adopt citizens as other states did, not even 
from among her subject neighbours the Perioeci. There was 
no Apollodorus class in Lacedaemon. Nor did the captured 
gold in the long run add to her strength — it was unremunera- 
tive ; it developed no industry, no commerce. From this 

^ Cf . [Plato] Alcib. 1. 122 e; Hippias Major, 2830; Xen. Lac. 
Rep. 14, 3, Spartans once forbidden to own gold, now swaggering over 
it ; Poseidonios, Frag. 41, ap. Athenaeus, vi. 233 f ; Plut. Lysander, 18. 

2 Cf. Isocrates, Archid. 52, and Paneg. 1 1 1 ; and Xen. Anab. vi. 6, 12. 



366 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

time we may date the rise of the heiress, a new figure in Spartan 
life, who, as later observers noticed,^ weakened the state ; for 
properties became massed in feminine hands, and Spartan 
men lost their national status through want of even the little 
needed to maintain their '* contributions." 

Poverty, as we are now learning to see, was always a near 
neighbour in a Greek state — poverty that very quickly reached 
the verge of endurance and then took on the most horrible 
guise. We know in various ways how it reached Sparta, and 
Isocrates reiterates with emphasis its pressure on Greek life 
generally.2 It was poverty, he insists, that drove men abroad 
in shoals to find a living in military service with the foreigner, 
even with the barbarian. Lysias and Aristophanes are wit- 
nesses, as we have seen, to the penury of Athens, of the treasury, 
and the individual. Two men stand out as advocates of the 
plan that was to solve many of the difficulties of poverty, but 
it was not till half-Hellenized kings replaced oligarchies and 
democracies that the colonial proposals of Xenophon and 
Isocrates were put into action, and with success. But, in the 
meantime, no state would attempt such a plan — perhaps even 
the means to initiate it were wanting. Xenophon's Ten 
Thousand would rather kill him than settle at the back of 
beyond, Heaven knows where, at the far end of the Euxine. 
Alexander planted his men on the Jaxartes and at the foot of 
Hindu Kush, and there they had to stay. 

Thirdly, the war had not made relations between Greek 
states any easier. Even the allies of Sparta soon felt they 
had helped to win her too complete a victory. Yet co-opera- 
tion was more than ever needed, for each state and every 
state was relatively smaller and weaker in a world of larger 
populations and greater wealth. The most serious call to some 
kind of united action was the awakening of Persia, which after 
forty years of inaction, content with an agreement with Athens, 
had once more intruded into Greek politics with a policy that 
seemed, like many things Persian, shifting and uncertain, but 
was in fact successful in bringing all the Greeks together " to 

1 Aristotle [Pol. ii. 9, 14-15, 1270 a) says nearly two-fifths of the 
country are held by women. 

2 Isocrates, Paneg. 168, 174 ; Archid. 64-68 ; Letter to Archi- 
damos, 8. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 367 

the gates of the King.'* ^ So we find a weakened Greece 
struggling with poverty at home and face to face abroad, 
East and West, with Oriental powers conscious of new oppor- 
tunities for the subjection of the Hellenic world. 

These are the great factors always present in the period from 
404 to 359 — the growth of the nations in population and 
wealth, the decline of Greece in both, and the heightened 
impossibility of concerted Greek action. The promised goal 
of autonomy for every town was by now an absurdity ; it was 
still talked of, it was put into practice, but never for any other 
purpose than to weaken a rival power. The real guiding 
principles of the age are to be looked for elsewhere. Three 
types of government with more than a small local outlook 
are to be recognized. There is, of course, the Empire or 
Hegemony of a Greek city-state. Sparta took it over from 
Athens at the end of the war, and managed it very badly — 
with an amount of oppression and exasperation for everybody 
that soon made enemies of all her allies. Athens tried to 
revive the glories of her old Confederacy with some accom- 
modation to the newer ideas of the period. And then Thebes 
broke for ever the power of Sparta, and introduced fresh 
elements of confusion everywhere. One aspect of the work of 
Thebes comes pleasantly to the modern student. Whatever 
her motive — and it was frankly the crippling of Sparta — she 
gave freedom to two oppressed nationalities of the Peloponnese, 
the Arcadians, and the Messenians. These Uberated races 
give us two striking examples of another type of government, 
which was now beginning to be tried in a quiet way in a good 
many corners of Greece, and which had a great future — 
Federalism. But so far the federal governments of Greece 
were weak, and the system had a rival in a new variety 
of monarchy. All round the Greek world we find kingdoms 
springing up, with a good deal of actual power and the promise 
of more. The coming of the Prince is heralded throughout 
the whole period ; and with Philip he came — to rule till 1776. 
It is surprising to a reader who knows the fifth-century litera- 
ture to find how monarchical the fourth century, apart from 
the popular orators, has become. Away from the bema no one 
seems to have had much enthusiasm for Democracy, and 

1 Polybius, vi. 49. 



368 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

perhaps even in an Athenian assembly the Funeral Speech of 
Pericles would by now have been impossible. 

The problem was one of leadership. The city-state failed 
to retain the hegemony of the Greek world ; the federal league 
hardly attempted it ; and before Philip princely government 
had not so wide an outlook. But whatever the power was to 
be that should unite the world, certain qualifications, it was 
growingly clear, were necessary. First of all, the dominant 
power must have a strong hold upon the tools of war. War 
was growing to be every year more of a specialist's business. 
The fifth century hardly saw a successful siege of a town of 
any dimensions ; Sparta notoriously never attempted it. 
But in the fourth century the siege is a great feature of war,i 
and siege engines come in. National levies in the older ^ 
Greece are disliked, and war is carried on by mercenaries. 
In the fifth century even Archidamos, king of Sparta, is repre- 
sented by Thucydides as saying that war is not so much an 
affair of arms as of finance ^ — a saying borne out by the 
course of the Peloponnesian War, in which victory was to 
fall to the power that could longest keep up the rebuilding 
of lost fleets, and, till Persia stepped in, that power was Athens, 
and afterwards it was Sparta.^ In the fourth century war 
cost still more money * — especially as the range widened 
over which it might be carried on. It was in Sicily that the 
new features of war first showed themselves, and Sicily saw 
the first successful Greek prince emerge from the new con- 
ditions. But the great money power of the world was still 
Persia. As early as 380 Isocrates laments that the King 
uses Greek troops against Evagoras.^ A few years later his 
friend, the Athenian general, Timotheos, entered the King's 
service, but this was hardly unfitting for the son of Conon. 

^ The reader of Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander will want no refer- 
ences for this statement. 

2 Thuc. i. 83, 2. 

3 There is a good remark in Plutarch's Alcih. 35, on the difficulties of 
a general contending against people with the Great King as x'^PVy^^' 
This is just, even if the King was as slack as the author of Hellenica 
Oxyvhynchia says (14, 2). 

* Isocrates {Evag. 60) says Artaxerxes spent 15,000 talents on his 
war against Evagoras. His satraps may have had some of it. 
^ Isocrates, Paneg. 135. 



•9|q'B5[uii[:).un 
uaaq QA-eq ppoM AoBjapajuoQ aq:^ uoraido oqqnd jo uoi:}.'BJ'Bd3j:d[ siq:j. 
:^noq:^iAV' — qoaads aq:). Aq poABid :^j'Bd gq:}. jo sis'BqdraQ q:^m ^^-Bads '?2:6§ 

•0 /eg 7M '^i^Id: 'JO s 
•(i^i^S § '? '0 'sdfVyioosj) snssBUJ'Boq'Bjj jo smsAuoTQ sj^sb ^ ou/CSouvj aq:^ 
p-BOJ :;.'Bqq. :^OTj:^'Bd "b aq :}ou ppoAV oq^ '(/g 'i9 '■^^ 'ptpty) uiqa aui'ES 
sq:^ UT 0J0p\[ '(tg '4MMd) -i^^P sj'eaA jnoj-A:^jTq:^ dqmd PP^ ^^ og ^ 

•^e 'i7 -A 'vomdi29H *u3x x 

— Ipsj o:^ punoq sbm :^i yQV(\ sppq J9A9]/\[ pjBnpg -ppoM 5[99Jf) 
9q; J9A0 SuiraoD si i^q; 9SuiBqo 9q; — pu^q ui j9||Bm 9q:^ uodn 
jBgq n^B 9;b| s|i puB s^gpi puB uopn;T:^suoo s;i :^nq 'Ao'BJ9p9juo3 
puoo9s siq:). jo s9un:^J0j 9q:^ A^onoj o:^ 9J9q >[sb:^ Jtio :^ou si :^x 
^•su9q;Y JO dTqsJ9pB9i 9q:^ J9pun pUB 'uoiun >[99s o:^ UB§9q 9099J{) 
! :).UBogiu§is si AoBJ9p9juo3 9q; jo uol;n:^I:^suo^9J iBn:^OB 9q| puB 
9iumBj§ojd ;uBiqijq 9q:^ jo uoipunCuoo 9sop 9q:^ |ng •s:^99[qns 
s,Sui}j 9q| p9pnpx9 puB 90B9(J s^Suix 9q:^ p9ziuSoo9j 9nSB9[ 
AV9U .I9q o:^ s9q|B p9:^:^impB su9qiy qoiqAV uo smj9| Aj9A 9qx 
•BisJ9(j :^suibSb 9pBsnjo oiU9|pquB(j B 9JBp9p ppoqs Ii\p AUB 
:^Bq; 9J9qM9sp JO su9qiY ui p9sodojd Aisnou9s 9q :^9A ;ou pinoo 
;i -^qSnoq; ibuoi^bu ui jpqo 9q:^ jo J9A\od 9q:^ 'A9p9S sdBqj9d 

pUB '9^qDS|l9JX P^^ 9^^^Ii[ JO S9SB0 ^BptlJO 9q| UI 'p9iW0qs 

Ajn;u9o :^SB| 9q; |nq ! Ajoi^siq [BUopBU uodn JOss9jojd b p 5[jom 
9q; JO |D9jj9 9q; 9Uip jo 9DUB|sip B qons ;b 9jnsB9m o; :^[nDijjip si 
:^I *su9qiv P diqspB9q 9q; J9pun s>[99J0 i^e jo uoijBJ9do-oo 

§Uq|IM 9q:^ Aq \\Q pUB 'BISJ9(J ;SUp3§B 9pBSnJD B '9099JQ JO 

uoiun 9q; 9JB s{Bsodojd s:^i Ag9ijg g'sugqjy jo s:^uids 
SuipB9i 9q:^ q:^iM. §uipuB:^SJ9pun 9Uios ;noq|iM p9Ai99 
-uoD :^ou SBM pjBAUOj :^9s 9UiiUBj§ojd 9q:^ :^Bq:^ p9soddns 
U99q sBq :^i puB 'uouo3 jo uos 9q| 'so9qjomix Jo pu9uj 9sop 
9q:^ SBM jo^BJO 9qx g,/Aqdoso][iqd jo J9qoB9:j J9qjo Aj9A9 
p9U9dB9qo „ qoiqM. 909idj9jsBUi siq 'soouiCddUVf^ :^9|qdiUBd 
9q; 'p|JOAV 9q| 9J0j9q U99q 'pBq s9:^bj30si jo ^^ qo99ds „ 

B SJB9A 99Jq| JO OM:^ JO^ 'SOpQ JO A0BJ9p9JUO3 9qj JO 
UOIjn|IJSU009J B — U9>[B:^ SBA\ d9JS pjBMJOJ :^B9jS B JB9A |X9U puB 

*j9q|9So:^ S9q9qx pUB su9q:^y AV9jq:^ s|U9A9 oav; 9qx x'^^'^^s 
siq JO sJ9ipps p9p99u B;jBds — UBUi B qons \\v^ o-\ pjBq sbm :^i 
puB 'UB^JBdg |bAo| b jo :^Bq:^ U99q pBq J99JBD siq ;nq *p9jjiiupB 
§ui:^ 9qj 'SuiopSuojM jo A;{in§ sbav 9q ' sob|is9§y jo uoiju9a 
-J9;ui 9q; qSnojqi p9|;inboB puB — BjJBdg ;b siq:^ joj p9ij; sbav 
9JJ •sn9iBJpcj 9q:^ pgpiBj *J9puBUiuioo UBjjBdg B 'sBupoqdg 

dniHd ox ssiomaa: koh^ ^s^ 



•t-i? 'soowfVfj *s9:).'Bj[0osi ^ 
•9^ 'l 'loi -ojsi 'nTH P^'s S5|^TH 8 '6 'I '1 01 'o^ 'hTH P^'^ sj^oth ^ 

om:^ spu9s 'BDTJ9iuy JO sa:^^:^^ p9:^iiin. ^^^ Jo qoB8 sb r^snf '9:^0A 
9U0 OABq 0| SBA\ '9ZIS s:^i J9A9:).BqM '9:^'B:^s q9B3 •s9p:^o:^siiv 
JO uoT;njos9J 9q:^ ui p9U0pU9in Ap'B9Jt'B 9J'B S9i|iY 9q:^ jo toxyduds 
9t[X 'sugqiY ui §ui|;ts s9inB jo '[punoo jo 'uoupm^s ^ P^^ 
•8189^003 uBiu9q;y 9q:^ — s9snoL[ om:^ ^bo ppoqs 9Av ABp-o:^ ;BqAv 
UT p9;s9A 9q o:^ sBM :^u9inuj9A0§ s:^i 'iuop99jj s|i JO SuipjBnS 
-9JBS 9qi puB AoBJ9p9juo3 9q:^ JO s9S0(iind tBJ9U9§ 9i[:^ jo j[ 
•su9q:^y jo s9inB 9q:^ jo mop99Jj 9q; 9q o:^ sbav qons ,/9sooqD 
lIBqs :^T uoi;n:^TjsuoD J9A9:^BqM. q:^TM 'snomouo|nB pUB 99jj„ 
*9p^ 9moH 9j9{dmoD 9ABq ppoqs A^iunmiuoD Aj9A9 ! umo:^ 
p9inB AuB UI p9DB|d 9q pitioqs uosujbS ou pUB 9;bj:^st§bui o^ 
•uopi:itos9J 9UIBS 9q:j ui ;i qim :^U9M (sodocj)) ^^ 9:^nqu| „ puB 

*q:^TM AbAVB 9U0p SBM S^Bp pp 9q| UI S9inB 9q:^ jO S90UBA91jS 

:^B9jS 9q:^ jo 9U0 og £'9mT:^ 9q:^ :^b ppq A9q:^ qoiqAV suoiss9SSod 
qons AuB p9ounou9j Ahbtii^ob suBra9q:^y :^Bq; £l£ jb9A 9q; jo 

S9:^BJ0OSI JO qD99ds B UI 90U9JU9S B UIOJJ lB9ddB U9A9 p^nOAV l^J 

g-ABAv AuB UI JO 9snox9 AuB uo s9qtB 9q:^ jo Ajo:^uj9| Aub ui pUBj 
JO 9snoq Aub 9§bSjjoui ui 9>[b:^ jo '9jinboB 'Anq o:^ UBiU9q:^y Aub 
9pBqjoj 'P9IJJBD puB 's9p:^o:^sijy Aq Bis9po3 9q:^ ui p9sodojd 
uoijnps9j 9q; — ^^ s9iqonj9p „ ou 9q o:^ 9J9M 9J9qx •A:^ipnb9Ui 
:^UB9Xu pBq puB uoiss9jddo o:^ s9Apsui9q; ;u9| pBq :^Bq:^ 

9n§B9l J9UIJ0J 9q; JO S9JnjB9J 9S0q; 9pnpX9 0:j UMBjp A|pj9JB0 
9J9AV S9Uq 9qX X </SpUB| UMO Jpq; JO :^U9UlAo[U9 9jn09S UI puB 

'snouiouo:^nB puB 99 jj '90B9d ui 9nui|U0D 0| S5[99Jf) 9q:^ mo^b 
Abui suB:^JBds 9q:^ :^Bq; „ — suiiB s:^i jo :^u9UI9:^b;s 9q:^ ui Apsop 
Aj9a |Bn;oB 9q:^ p9qono:^ :^i puy •uisii;BJ9p93 pjBMo:^ d9;s B jo 
Suiqj9Uios SBM ^ — :^09dsB J9q;ouB sBq :^i :^na; ,/9Aii 9As. qoiqAV 
J9pun suoi^ipuoD 9q:j,, p9nB0 90UO U09t3 ;BqAV UT p9ApAUl 
SBM :^Bq:^ '. p9Ziu§oo9J AjqBjnouoq bisj9(J q:^iM — utbSb AoBJ9p9j 
-U03 pp 9q; 95iq Aj9a SBM :^i -i^ou jo Abp tiA9 :^Bq:^ p9ss9u:nM 
9ABq o:^ q§nou9 pp sbm 9q J9qj9qM '£if ui S909id o:^ i^Bj o:^ 
UBS9q |Bq:^ AoBJ9p9juo3 9q:^ p9J9qui9Ui9J 'll£ ui :^09fojd 9q:^ jo 
i^qSnoq:^ oqM *UBiU9q:^y AJ9A3 -^sBd 9q:^ uiojj 9mB0 uoi^BJids 
-UT 9q; :^Bq; SuiAu9p ou si 9J9qx 'i^snf J9qp§o:qB :^ou si siqx 
qiBj :^sniu :^t ' ;q§Tm 9tqBJ9pisuoD Aub pBq 9U0|B 9U0 *s:^qSTJ 
pBq HB — ^ UI p9piAip A|[U9A9un 9J9M |q§iui puB :^qSiJ ' iBtipB 
9q:^ SuuouSi 'pgpi |B0p9JO9q; b :^b p9UiiB ^ suot|bjo:^s9J we 
9>[T| puB 'uoi;bjo;s9J b SBM :ji f ;sBd 9q:^ o:^ pjBM5[0Bq p9>[00| ;t 

^8^ c NViNOzaa 'oni:h hoihm naaNn 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 369 

No one could compete in wealth with the King of Persia, and 
whatever was to be bought, he could buy — ships, soldiers, 
politicians. 

But as important as wealth for the hegemony of the Greek 
world was some clear, strong, and wide outlook in the ruler, 
whether demos, or council, or prince. Whoever was to rule 
must have enough political intelligence and insight to realize 
the unity of the world and the other new elements in the 
situation before him. Most men are limited in outlook and 
intelligence ; the Greeks were becoming very limited — a 
Nemesis not unfamiliar among the sons of great or successful 
parents. The time comes when political contrivances, that 
have been necessary and inevitable in their day, are outworn 
and grow dangerous. State sovereignty made the United 
States of America possible ; to-day few foreigners who watch 
its operations would say that it could not be greatly reduced 
with advantage.^ The Greek's local attachments stood in 
the way of his sympathies and his power of grasping a world- 
situation. 

In the third place, the future ruler must be able to secure 
that mankind should not recede in culture and civilization. 
He must have an intelligent feeling for the great achievements 
of Greek genius. Pericles was right ; Athens had been, and 
was, an education of mankind, and he who was to rule and 
guide mankind must be trustee for this splendid heritage. 
Such a task meant some depth of nature, a capacity not 
quickly found in Spartan, Theban, or Roman. 

The fourth qualification for the new ruler — perhaps the 
hardest to find — was some power of enlisting the ruled, of 
winning at least their consent if not their co-operation. The 
Greek race, said Aristotle, lying between Europe and Asia, 
and sharing the spiritual gifts of both, " if it could be formed 
into one sta,te, would be able to rule the world." ^ xhe first 
thing on which Isocrates insists, if Athens in 380, or if Philip 

1 Immigration from Europe into the Eastern States, and the settle- 
ment by colonists from them of the Western States, together with the 
relegation of slavery to the past, have dimmed the old traditions and 
associations that made State right a passion. 

2 Aristotle, Pol. vii. 7, 3, 1^2,7 h. Thucydides had made a similar 
remark about the Scythians (ii. 97). 

24 

; 



370 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

in 346, can be induced to lead a crusade against Persia, is the 
reconciliation of the Greek world within itself — and " by now,'* 
he says in 346, " I know they are levelled down together by 
misfortunes, and will choose the advantages of concord," 
and Philip can manage it, he alone. ^ 

The difficulties to be overcome were obvious. Greece 
was doubly disintegrated — " We quarrel about the Cyclades, 
and abandon all those Greek cities of Asia, all those resources, 
to the King." ^ No Greek city-state could long trust its 
neighbour — no, nor by now its citizens. Faction and fury 
had always marked Greek politics, but they had at least 
implied a certain patriotism ; now, the citizens simply went 
away and settled where business took them, or enlisted by 
the thousand under the Persian — satrap, prince, or King. In 
a sense, it was an armed particularism, too ; for the land was 
studded with rock-fortresses, here an Acropolis, there an 
Acrocorinthus, a Cadmeia, which gave the cities a military 
significance, useless in offensive warfare, fatally effective in 
defensive ; and where mercenary soldiers were everywhere 
available, even a small town could be amazingly strong just 
for the short time that might be critical. ^ Pharnabazos 
rebuilt the Long Walls of Athens, because he saw that a 
fortress in Attica linked with the sea would be irreducible by the 
Spartans for ever, imless he gave them a fleet, which he did 
not mean to do, and thus their hegemony would be so shaken 
as to be ineffective except for Persian purposes. He was 
right.* " There is nothing easier for the Persian," says 
Isocrates, " than to find means to keep us from ever leaving 
off to fight against one another. ... It is perfectly plain and 
easy ; it is impossible ever to have a secure peace unless we 
join in a common war against the barbarians, impossible for 
the Greeks to be of one mind till we draw our advantages 
from the same sources and take our risks against the same 
people.*' ^ The last sentence is not obscure to anyone who 

1 Isocrates, Philip, 40, 41. ^ Isocrates, Paneg. 136. 

3 Cf. the advice given by Conon to Pharnabazos about the island 
and sea-board cities in 393 (Xen. Hellenica, iv. 8, 2). 

* Xen. Hellenica, iv. 8, 9. 

5 Isocrates, Paneg. 134, 173. Cf. Panath. 160, with its picture of 
separate Greek embassies at Susa intriguing against each other. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 371 

remembers the thirty thousand archers that drove Agesilaos 
out of Asia.^ If this pleasantry about the coinage served to 
salve Spartan pride, it reveals at once the strength of the 
Persian King and the weakness of Sparta. No Greek power 
controlled so many ** archers,** and no Greek state could 
resist them. 

But if these were the obstacles to Greek union, other 
things, as we have seen, worked for it. Culture, it was more 
and more felt, had no provincialisms. The Greek name was 
less a sign of blood than of mind ; it belonged to those who 
thought and felt in the Greek way — a universal term for the 
highest humanity.2 Commerce, too, even if the cultured 
despised it, was another bond of union, fusing races in every 
port of the Mediterranean already, as it was to do on a larger 
scale in Alexandria and Antioch. There was clearly, too, a 
sense widely prevalent that the old city-state ideals had 
failed — a feeling that they were hardly worth contending 
for ; the career of Demosthenes is a witness to this, for his 
whole life was a protest against it. And there was a nobler 
sense, too, that Greeks were Greeks. War between Greeks, 
Plato taught, 3 was unnatural — it was madness and folly, 
said Isocrates ; * and Aristophanes had said so before either 
of them. 5 

It was for freedom that the Greek world had fought ; and 
it was believed at the moment that the day, which saw the 
returned exiles level the Long Walls of Athens to the music 
of flute-girls, was to be the First Day of Greek Freedom. 
The first question now was, whether freedom and Spartan 
hegemony were compatible. 

Our chief authorities for this period are Xenophon and 
Isocrates. It is freely made a matter of reproach against 
Xenophon that he was a friend of Sparta — Freeman hurls 
'* renegade " at him whenever it comes into his head ; renegade 
he was not, but up to a certain point he did admire Sparta 
and her institutions and some of her men. This admiration 
makes his story more significant ; and his long residence in the 
Peloponnese, not far from a sanctuary of truce, his intimacy 

^ Plut. Artax. 20. Cf. p. 223. ^ Isocrates, Paneg. 50. 

* Plato, Rep. V.-470. * Isocrates, Paneg. 133 f. 

^ Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 1128 f. 



372 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

with Spartan leaders, and his exclusion in large measure from 
Athenian sources of information, all contribute to bring into 
his pages a fullness and freshness of detail about Peloponnesian 
matters that we find nowhere else. Much that he tells of 
EHs, let us say, or Phleious or Sicyon, is perhaps in itself of 
little significance in the world's history ; these were small 
and unimportant places, but they stood in close relations 
with a great power, and everything that illuminates Sparta's 
methods at this period is of value to the historian who wishes 
to understand the world's course. The fact also holds good 
here too, that whenever Xenophon has a real story to tell, 
it is always interesting ; and here, as in other parts of his 
writings, he takes us on to ground untrodden by the Athenians 
and their friends. 

Sparta, it is generally recognized, had become under the 
Lycurgean system essentially an armed camp. Her constant 
peril was, as we have seen, the Helot population, and most of 
her institutions were designed to safeguard her in this quarter.^ 
Apart from Tarentum, the story of whose founding is very 
obscure, Sparta had no colonies. All her expansion had been 
at the cost of her neighbours, adding field to field, ^ everything 
as it were within a ring fence, and that very carefully guarded. 
Foreign influences, ideas of freedom, should not reach the 
Helots ; there was no Messenian nation. Outside her actual 
domain Sparta was faced with difficulties in the Peloponnese 
itself. She could not keep out liberal ideas, democracy, and 
the love of freedom ; and several communities of the Pelopon- 
nese were conspicuously democratic in sentiment and govern- 
ment — Argos, Mantineia, and Elis, while even in more loyal and 
friendly states the poison worked, as the.story of Sicyon shows.^ 
Quite apart from the danger this meant among the Helots, 
it bore upon Sparta's hegemony of the world. For, when 
she led her troops out, it was usually by one road — over the 
mountains northward into Arcadia, past Tegea, Mantineia, 
and Orchomenos, and then round eastward past Phleious 
to the Isthmus of Corinth. The early relations of Sparta 

1 Thuc. iv. 80. 

2 On the large holdings of land by Spartiates, see Isocrates, Panath. 
179, beyond what any other Greeks hold. 

^ Sicyon, Xen. Hellenica, vii. i, 44-46. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 373 

with Tegea are described by Herodotus/ in some very interest- 
ing chapters. The great Democratic aUiance engineered by 
Alcibiades after the Peace of Nicias is set forth by Thucydides. 
It was a failure, and collapsed as a result of one of the many 
battles of Mantineia ; but Sparta remembered it, for she had 
a long memory and never let anything slip, even if she had 
to wait. 

In the forty years now under survey Sparta was twice in a 
position of triumph and power which left her her hands free to 
improve her arrangements at home. The victory of 404 was 
followed by the resolve to '' discipline " Elis. The land was 
ravaged more than once, till the drunken democrat leader 
Thrasydaios sobered down and accepted Sparta's terms. 
The fortifications of Phea and Cyllene were dismantled, and 
autonomy was given to all the communes and townships ; 
the temple of Olympian Zeus was left to the men of Elis, and 
peace and an alliance established.^ Autonomy once more is 
the watchword, but once more it is the watchword with the 
qualification familiar to us in Thucydides — " conveniently 
for the Spartans." ^ Involved in the story is a sub-plot ; 
Xenias, who was said to measure his father's money by the 
bushel, conceived the hope of an agreement with Sparta, and 
with his friends set about a massacre of the democrat party, 
and killed a man very like Thrasydaios. But that hero was 
elsewhere drunk, asleep, and safe. His partisans found him, 
swarmed about him " like bees round a queen," and the tide 
turned, and the oligarchic faction had to fly to the Spartans. 
It is likely enough that, after Thrasydaios had negotiated his 
peace, they came back and drove him out. It is interesting 
to note in passing the frequent imputation at this period of 
drunkenness to democrat leaders ; Cleophon addressed the 
Ecclesia drunk, we are told,* and Isocrates suggests that in 
Athens a drunkard always seems a more loyal democrat than 
a man who does not get tipsy. ^ It looks very like mere oli- 
garchic slander — the only way in which some people could 
account for democratic principles by now. They make no 
such allegations as to the leaders in old days. 

1 Herodotus, i. 65-68. 2 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 2, 21-31. 

^ Thuc. i. 144, rois AaKedaifxoviois CTnrrjdeicDS avTOvoixelo-Oai. 

^'AOrjvaiav IldKireia, 34, 3. ^ isocrates, de Pace, 13. 



374 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP mKM 

Again, in 386 the Peace of Antalkidas gave Sparta a fresh 
triumph over foes abroad and freedom to look nearer home. 
They sent orders to the Mantineians to take down their walls — 
otherwise they would look on them as enemies, for they had 
noticed a good deal that was suspicious, viz. grain exports to 
Argos, a refusal of military service on the pretext of some 
sacred truce or other, and, in short, a general envy of Sparta, 
and pleasure in her misfortunes.^ Not unnaturally the demand 
was refused, and a siege followed, one of the few in which 
Spartans were successful. They dammed up the river which 
flowed through the city, just where it left the walls ; the town 
was flooded, and its foundations began to give way. The 
terms of surrender were stiffened by the new demand that 
the city should be broken up into villages. The old exiled 
Spartan king, Pausanias, who lived there, interceded with his 
son and successor for the friends of Argos, who were allowed 
to go with their lives. But " the walls were destroyed and 
Mantineia distributed into four villages as of old. At first 
they were annoyed at having to leave their houses and build 
other ones ; but when the people of substance found them- 
selves living nearer their farms among the villages and in 
enjoyment of aristocratic government, and rid of the weari- 
some demagogues, they began to be pleased." ^ The Spartans 
sent to each of these villages a xenagos, a military officer to 
levy contingents, which were raised far more readily, Xenophon 
says, under the new system than under the democracy. This 
was '* autonomy convenient to the Spartans." Isocrates, 
writing shortly after the event, puts it differently — ''When 
the peace was made, they destroyed the city of the Manti- 
neians " ; ^ and looking back at it in after years (355) he sums 
up the story and points to the results — " they abused the 
Peloponnese and filled it with revolutions and wars. What 
city was there which they did not attack ? " — Elis, Corinth, 
Mantineia, he runs over, Phleious and Argos — " they never left 

1 Xen. Hellenica, v. 2, 1-2. 

2 Xen. Hellenica, v. 2, 7. How ready they were to be done with 
the village system and to rebuild their walls in 371, in spite of the 
friendly suggestions of Agesilaos to delay, he tells in a more convincing 
section (vi. 5, 3-5). 

8 Isocrates, Paneg. 126. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 375 

ofif ill-treating the rest and preparing for themselves the defeat 
at Leuctra. Some say that defeat was the cause of Sparta's 
trouble ; they are wrong. It was not because of Leuctra 
that their allies hated them, it was the outrages of the years 
before it that brought Leuctra upon them." ^ 

How men felt about the Spartans in the Peloponnese 
is brought out by Xenophon's story of the plot of Kinadon, a 
disfranchised Spartiate (about 398-397). ^ *' He took me,'* said 
the informer, " to the edge of the market-place and told me to 
count how many Spartiates were in the market. I counted — 
king, ephors, gerusia, and others, about forty. Why did you 
tell me to count them, Kinadon ? said I. And he answered : 
These reckon as your enemies, and the rest — all the rest, 
four thousand and more — your allies ; " and the same on 
country roads and on the farms — one Spartiate, one enemy, 
and everybody else an ally — helots, neodamodes, inferiors, and 
perioeci ; ^ *' for wherever among these there was talk at all 
about Spartiates, not a man of them could conceal that he 
would like to eat them raw " — the old proverbial Greek phrase 
with which Zeus twitted Hera about the Trojans. So much 
for Spartan rule at home and in the Peloponnese. 

With these principles and no more faculty than this 
for winning the consent of the ruled, Sparta undertook to rule 
the Greek world at large. Empire of the sea, says Isocrates, 
playing on the word apxv, was to them the beginning of mis- 
fortunes ; they found power a very hetaira, charming and 
ruinous.* The war, as said above, had left Sparta weakened, 
and her government, as Polybius pointed out, had never been 
designed for empire abroad. *' As long," he says,^ " as their 
ambition was confined to governing their immediate neigh- 
bours, or even the Peloponnesians only, they could manage 
with the resources and supplies of Laconia itself, having all the 
material of war ready to hand, and being able without much 
expenditure of time to return home or convey provisions with 
them. But directly they took in hand to dispatch naval ex- 

^ Isocrates, de Pace, 99, 100. ^ Xen. Hellenica, iii. 3, 4-1 1. 

3 Perioecic towns, says Isocrates {Panath. 179), are called poleis, but 
in reality have less power than Athenian demes, 

* Isocrates, de Pace, loi, 103. So too Polybius, vi. 50. 

^ Polybius, vi. 49 (Shuckburgh's translation, shghtly altered). 



376 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

peditions, or to go on campaigns on land outside the Pelopon- 
nese, it was evident that neither their iron currency, nor their 
use of crops for payment in kind, would be able to supply them 
with what they lacked if they abode by the legislation of 
Lycurgus ; for such undertakings required as well a currency 
universally accepted and goods from abroad. So they were 
compelled to go to the gates of the Persians, to lay tribute 
on the islanders, and exact silver from all the Greeks/* Be- 
tween 404 and 393 Sparta saw her navy decline — it had been 
built with Persian gold, for Persia's purposes ; Persia wanted 
it no more, and a Persian fleet under Conon destroyed it. 

Another fatal weakness of the system of Lycurgus was 
that it bred nothing but soldiers. The Spartan harmost, of 
whom Lysander himself said that he did not understand how 
to rule freemen, was a typical product of Spartan education 
— simply unintelligent of everything, as incapable as a Turk 
of comprehending how the minds of men move or that they 
do move at all. A city, Aristotle said,^ must have quality 
and quantity — *' by quality I mean freedom, wealth, education, 
good birth ; by quantity, superiority of numbers." Sparta 
failed in both directions — she had not the training, the quick- 
ness and variety of mind that free institutions alone can give, 
any more than she had wealth or numbers. Every Greek 
dreaded the Spartan ; none liked him. What Kinadon had 
pointed out to the conspirator in the Spartan market, held all 
over the world. Only those stuck to her who could by her 
means alone enjoy the tyrannical rule of a clique over their 
fellow-citizens ; and these " decarchies " of Lysander notori- 
ously shattered what goodwill Sparta had won by ending the 
Athenian Empire. 2 

Yet another source of weakness for Sparta was a want of 
clear policy regarding her Empire. Athens with a negligible 
minority had had a consistent plan in dealing with her allies 
and dependants — as consistent as the changing face of human 
things will allow — a plan that developed, but in a way that 
could be foreseen. Sparta was the prey of parties. Lysander 
played for his own hand ; King Pausanias countered him 
when he could — generally for the good of Greece ; boards of 

1 Aristotle, Pol. iv. 12, i, 1296 h. 

2 On the decarchies, see Isocrates, Paneg. iio-i 14. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 377 

ephors seem to have come and gone, watching, supporting, or 
checking king and general as they chose ; and meanwhile 
there were plots and counterplots — " it is said," reports 
Aristotle, ** that at Sparta Lysander attempted to overthrow 
the monarchy, and King Pausanias the ephoralty." ^ Lysander 
saw Sparta renounce his scheme of decarchies, and Pausanias 
was finally exiled — nominally for failing to rescue Lysander's 
dead body without a truce. ^ Sparta^ at last got a real head 
in Agesilaos, but not a good one. 

Ten years of Spartan supremacy saw Corinth and Thebes 
united with Athens against her. Representatives of these 
cities had wished in 404 to destroy Athens altogether — a few 
years showed them how needful she was. The movement 
which drew the cities together against Sparta reached its 
height, when the quarrel between Sparta and Persia became 
open and obvious. The Persian King had genuine grievances. 
Persian subsidies had carried Sparta through the latter half 
of the Peloponnesian War to her victory ; and then, in the 
civil war between the princes, Sparta had countenanced and 
supported the one who fell, the usurper. In a series of bargains 
made at Miletus in the years 412-41 1, Sparta had with some 
haggling virtually abandoned the Greeks of Asia Minor to 
Persia.^ So long as Cyrus was in control of Persian policy 
in the West and in friendly relations with Sparta through 
Lysander, no question had arisen ; Lysander had organized 
his decarchies in the cities, and Cyrus tolerated it. But when 
Cyrus had fallen, the Asiatic Greeks were assigned to Tissa- 
phernes, who had negotiated the third treaty of Miletus. It 
has been suggested * that the cities were still held by oligarchies 
friendly to Sparta ; which meant some understanding between 
the democratic parties and Persia — the victory of democrat 
or of Persian would be a triumph for both, and equally a blow 
to Sparta. That Sparta realized this and began to trim, seems 
to follow from Xenophon's statement that the ephors abolished 

1 Aristotle, Pol. v. i, 10, 1301 6. 

2 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 5, 25. For Pausanias* literary occupations 
in exile, see a damaged passage in Strabo, c. 2,^6. See also Pausanias, 
iii. 5, 1-6. 

* The three treaties are in Thuc. viii. 18, 37, 58. 

* By Eduard Meyer, Theopomps Hellenika, p. 113. 



378 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

the decarchies. But now Tissaphernes moved, and the oHgarchs 
of her own creation appealed to Sparta for protection against the 
Persians to whom Sparta had ceded them by a treaty which was 
the basis of her present position of power. It was an awkward 
situation. Sparta tried to meet it by an embassy " forbidding " 
Tissaphernes to take active steps against the cities. But the 
satrap could read the situation too, and he replied by besieging 
Cyme. Sparta could do nothing now but make war — not 
on the King, but on Tissaphernes. The loose texture of the 
Persian Empire saved such a distinction from absurdity. 

The Spartan war on Persia achieved the restoration of 
Athens. Phamabazos, a more active spirit than Tissaphernes, 
went up to Susa and got the easy-going King interested in the 
project of a fleet. It may be that the Spartan government 
had some wind of this, before the Syracusan Herodas brought 
Greece news of the three hundred Persian ships preparing.^ 
At all events, they told Thibron, their commander, to attempt 
Caria, the possession of which would have controlled any 
Persian attack in Aegaean waters. ^ But neither Thibron 
nor his successors were in a position to do anything effective. 
The country was enormous, and they lacked cavalry ; and the 
enemy avoided general actions. The two satraps were rivals, 
and neither of them was very sorry to see the other occupied 
with the Greek marauders. But the manoeuvre, by which 
Tissaphernes headed Derkylidas into the satrapy of Phama- 
bazos, converted the " war against Tissaphernes " into open 
war with Persia. ^ Derkylidas maintained himself, moved 
about, and had some successes. He, too, was told to attempt 
Caria, but the two satraps met him and began negotiations, 
which had to receive the sanction of the King and of Sparta. 
In reality, these negotiations could not have been meant to 
achieve anything, but Pharnabazos needed time to get his 
fleet in order. * 

Then came the definite news in 396 that Persia was really 
preparing a fleet, and it waked anxiety in Sparta. Lysander, 
however, remembered the successful return of the Ten Thou- 

^ Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, i. ^ Meyer, Theopomps Hellenika, p. 9. 
^ Judeich, Kleinas. Stud. p. 45. 

* Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 18-20, and Judeich, op. cit. p. 52. See also 
Isocrates, Paneg. 142. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 379 

sand, and reckoned that the Greeks had fleet enough to face 
the Persian navy. The result was the invasion of Asia by 
Agesilaos.i 

It seems quite clear that Agesilaos crossed the Aegaean 
with the very largest intentions — " he had great hopes that 
he would take the King." ^ ^n earlier king of Sparta, who 
was reckoned mad, had declined such a venture ; ^ but there 
were still in Asia the Greek mercenaries who had gone to the 
King's very gates and had all but taken the King ; why 
should they not go up again and do it ? * Agesilaos revealed 
to Tissaphernes another object — ^the autonomy (much-used 
word) of the Greek cities in Asia, and they made another truce, 
to see what the King would say.^ But the solemn sacrifice, 
which Agesilaos had wanted to perform in the style of 
Agamemnon at Aulis, surely suggested a larger purpose ^ — 
Agamemnon had not been content to make truces to see if 
Priam would allow a few towns to govern themselves. No, the 
Greek world took the great venture seriously. Jason, accord- 
ing to Polydamas in Xenophon, said he thought the Great King 
would be easier to conquer than Greece, and added that he 
remembered that the Great King had been reduced to 
dreadful straits (ek irdv a<f)UeTo) by Agesilaos.' Isocrates 
believed the thing could be done — and for years urged it upon 
his countrymen, and then on Philip ; the only reason he saw 
for the failure of Agesilaos was that the Spartan had two 
aims, the reduction of the King and the restoration of friends 
of his own to cities which had exiled them,^ and the latter 
purpose involved so much trouble and confusion that there 
was no chance of doing anything against the barbarian.^ In 
other words, Sparta had lost the goodwill of Greece. Agesilaos 
himself explained his retreat, as we have seen, by the thirty 
thousand " archers " sent to Greece.^*^ 

^ Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 2. 2 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 5,1. 

^ Cleomenes, Herodotus, v. 49 ff. * Xen. Hellenica, iv. i, 41.. 

* Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 5-6. 

• Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 3-4 ; his anger with the Boeotarchs who 
stopped it. 

' Xen. Hellenica, vi. i, 12. 

® A curious but illuminating commentary on the Spartan demand 
for the autonomy of the cities. 

» Isocrates, Philip, Zy. i« Plut. Agesilaos, 20. 



38o FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

This subsidy has been put in a very odious light by Xeno- 
phon as virtually a bribe. The unknown contemporary 
historian, whose fragments were found at Oxyrhynchos, 
maintains that the gold was not the cause of the war, though 
some say so, not knowing that all the men concerned had 
been at enmity for a long while with the Spartans, and were on 
the look-out for some means of bringing on war.^ War, as we 
have seen, was more and more a matter of finance, and this 
subsidy sent by Tithraustes made it possible for the Spartans 
to be embroiled in Europe, while the Persian fleet imder 
Conon really got to work after its many hindrances. And so 
it fell out. Agesilaos was recalled. Conon won the battle 
of Cnidos, and the Athenian Long Walls rose again. The old 
idea of Tissaphernes had prevailed in the hands of his rival — 
to keep the Greek powers level and balanced. ^ 

Let us sum up what this war between Sparta and Persia 
has brought out. Persia has won the victory by successful 
use of the Spartan engine — the appeal to particularism. 
Greece is divided by Persia, and Persia triumphs, just as 
Sparta divides and triumphs over the Peloponnese ; and 
another instance is added to the Hst of those who urge Greece 
to union by showing her what she suffers from division. For 
the moment it is the triumph of Persia and of particularism. 
But some prophetic hints of the future appear. The plan of a 
bold, strong blow at the heart of Persia was formed and was 
tried. It failed, but it was remembered and quoted, and it 
would be tried again. And through the failure and the con- 
fusion we get a gleam of a prince and a hero. Agesilaos was 
not a very great man ; he was a hard, narrow, cunning, capable 
Spartan with no great gifts, no real statesmanship, no moral 
depth, only the near outlook of an old-time Spartan king — ^not 
a great soldier even — a politician of energy and ambition on 
old lines and a low plane ; yet he captured the interest of 
Xenophon, for there was something of a man about him, 
something soldierly, something of a prince, and his career 
seemed to show that some day a prince might achieve a final 
victory over Persia. 

^ Hellenica Oxyvhynchia, 2, 1,2; col. i., ii. He declines into the 
suggestion that the politicians had an interest in a state of war existing. 
2 Thuc. viii. 57, e^ovXero inavLcrovv. See Chapter VII. p. 226 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 381 

In spite of some victorious battles, the next few years were 
a time of difficulty for Sparta, till in 387 her envoy, Antalkidas, 
came down from Susa with a new and final instrument for the 
humiliation of the Greeks — that " King's Peace " which was 
made in the spring of 386. The words of this document 
deserve quotation. *' King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the 
cities in Asia shall be his, and of the islands Clazomenai and 
Cyprus. All the other Greek cities, little and great, he allows 
to be autonomous, except Lemnos and Imbros and Scyros, 
and these as of old shall belong to the Athenians. And which- 
ever party does not accept this peace, on them I will make war 
with those who agree to it, both on land and on sea, with ships 
and with money." 1 

The peace is a landmark in Greek history. That it pro- 
claimed from the house-tops the bankruptcy of the city-state, 
while by a peculiar irony of fate it made the autonomy of all 
Greek cities the fundamental article of the settlement, is the 
striking verdict of a Canadian scholar. 2 And for years the 
Spartans lorded it over Greece as the champions and repre- 
sentatives of the King's Peace. What the Greeks thought of 
it we can read in the Panegyric of Isocrates written at or about 
the time — in Polybius— in Plutarch. Once, says Isocrates,^ 
x\thens was leader of Greece, and drove the Persian off the 
sea and off the Aegaean coast ; *' but now it is he who manages 
Greek affairs, gives his orders as to what is to be done, and all 
but appoints quarter-masters in the cities. ... Is he not 
arbiter of war ? manager of peace ? ... do we not go sailing 
away to him, as to a master, to tell tales of one another ? and 
call him Great King as if we were his captives ? " "In that 
peace of Antalkidas," wrote Polybius,* the Spartans " sold 
and betrayed the Greek cities to get money to procure them- 
selves lordship over the Greeks." " A peace, if we can call 
that peace," says Plutarch, ° ** which was an outrage, a betrayal 
of Greece ; no war ever brought an end laden with more dis- 
honour to the vanquished." Antalkidas, he says, using a 
favourite phrase from Herodotus, " danced away Leonidas 
and Callicratidas up there among the Persians " ; ** the glory 

^ Xen. Hellenica, v. i, 31. 

2 W. S. Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, p. 6. 

3 Paneg. 120, 121. * Polybius, vi. 49. ^ Plut. Artax. 21, 22. 



382 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

of Sparta perished before Leuctra." It was Athens, says 
Beloch, who had brought in the barbarian, meaning in 393 ; 
\t would be more just to say Sparta in 408. If it is urged in 
reply to this charge of the betrayal of Greece that the fifty 
years between the return of Antalkidas from Susa and the 
succession of Alexander to the throne of Macedon saw a wide 
diffusion of Greek influence Jin Asia Minor,^ this was, no 
doubt, a great gain to mankind in the long run ; but we may 
remember that, when Callias negotiated his far more honourable 
agreement at Susa, in the days of Pericles and of the Athenian 
Empire, the Greek cities of the coast were reunited to their 
hinterland, and the penetration of Asia by Greek ideas began 
again, and no shame went with it. The " King's Peace " 
humiliated Greece. 

Meanwhile the Peace promised Sparta the aid of Persia in 
applying her Peloponnesian methods on a wider scale. Every 
one who wished to disorganize and divide Greece turned 
naturally to her. Acanthus invoked her against the rising 
confederacy of Olynthos, and with the aid of Amyntas of 
Macedon she effected its disruption and the ruin of the cities 
— destroying Greek life and opening the door to Amyntas' 
successor, in her jealousy of anything like union among Greeks. 
Polydamas of Pharsalos invited her to destroy the power 
which Jason was consolidating, but in this instance Sparta 
declined to intervene — in view of all she was doing, ^ but she 
encouraged Polydamas to do his best. Elsewhere there was 
even a new violence in Spartan procedure — the successful 
seizure of the Cadmeia, the attempt to seize the Peiraieus, 
had little excuse even in the lax morality of Greek politics. 
But the comment of Agesilaos makes all other needless. There 
was some indignation in Sparta against Phoebidas for seizing 
the Cadmeia ; but, said Agesilaos, " if he had done what was 
harmful to Sparta, he deserved to be punished ; but if what was 
to her advantage — well, there was an ancient custom that 
permitted such experiments." ^ 

1 Chapter VII. p. 220, 

2 It is also possible that Jason's power, being more consolidated 
than that of a group of federated cities, would have been more difficult 
to deal with — none of the fissures in it that every Greek union displayed. 

^ Xen. Hellenica, v. 2, 32; r a roiavra avroa-xedid^eiv. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 383 

The attitude of Sparta to every other Greek state hope- 
lessly wrecked any chance she might have had of an effective 
headship of Greece. The victory of Cnidos in 394 was popular, 
and seemed to . mark an epoch ; Theopompus, the historian, 
made it the term of his work which concluded the history of 
Thucydides.i It was the end of Spartan rule of the sea, and 
Conon and Phamabazos " went sailing round among the islands 
and the towns on the seaboard, driving out the Laconian 
harmosts, and encouraging the cities with the promise that 
they would not fortify their citadels, but would leave them 
autonomous " 2 — and, as the case of Rhodes suggests, de- 
mocracies. ^ Some of the cities, Diodorus sa57S, kept their 
freedom and some joined Conon.* *' He was the first," says 
Demosthenes, '* to give the city something to say about 
hegemony to the Spartans," ^ and he quotes the phrase from 
the inscription set upon Conon's honour to the effect that 
" he set free the allies of the Athenians." It is a fine 
phrase — strikingly like that coined in 404 when the Athenian 
walls were demolished on the First Day of Freedom. Once 
more the delusive words — Freedom and Autonomy. 

From now onward Athens began to hold her own and to 
re-gather allies — Mitylene, Byzantium, Chios. An Athenian 
inscription,^ pieced together out of fragments, commemorates 
the treaty with Chios — making " the Chians allies for (eV) ' 
freedom and autonomy " ; ''if any attack the Athenians, the 
Chians shall lend aid to|the utmost of their power ; and if any 
attack the Chians, the Athenians shall lend aid to the utmost 
of their power " ; and " the alliance shall be for all time." The 
treaty lays down significantly that they " shall keep the peace 
and the friendship and the oaths and the existing agreement, 
which the King swore and the Athenians and the Spartans 
and the rest of the Greeks." 

In the winter of 379-378 the Thebans managed to get 
the Spartans out of their Cadmeia.® Some little time later, 

1 Diodorus, xiv. 84. 2 Xen. Hellenica, iv. 8, i. 

* Hellenica Oxyvhynchia, c. 10 ; E. Meyer, Theopomps Hellenika, 

P-75. 

* Diodorus, xiv. 84. ^ Demosthenes, Lept. 68. 
« Hicks and Hill, No. 98. ' Or " on the basis of." 

^ Xen. Hellenica, v. 4, 2-12 ; and Plut. Pelopidas. 



384 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Sphodrias, a Spartan commander, raided the Peiraieus. He 
was tried for this at Sparta — and acquitted through the inter- 
vention of Agesilaos ; he was guilty of wrongdoing, the king 
admitted, but his career had been that of a loyal Spartan, and 
it was hard to kill such a man — Sparta needed soldiers of his 
stamp.^ The two events threw Athens and Thebes together, 
and next year a great forward step was taken — a reconstitution 
of the Confederacy of Delos. For two or three years a 
'* speech " of Isocrates had. been before the world, the 
pamphlet Panegyricos, his masterpiece which " cheapened 
every other teacher of philosophy. " 2 jh^ orator was the 
close friend of Timotheos, the son of Conon, and it has been 
supposed that the programme set forward was not con- 
ceived without some understanding with the leading 
spirits of Athens. 3 Briefly its proposals are the union 
of Greece, a crusade against Persia, and all by the willing 
co-operation of all Greeks under the headship of Athens. It 
is difficult to measure at such a distance of time the effect of the 
work of a professor upon national history ; but the last century 
showed, in the crucial cases of Fichte and Treitschke, and 
perhaps Seeley, the power of the chair in national thought. It 
could not yet be seriously proposed in Athens or elsewhere that 
any city should declare a Panhellenic crusade against Persia. 
The very terms on which Athens admitted allies to her new 
league recognized the King's Peace and excluded the King's 
subjects. But the close conjunction of the brilliant programme 
and the actual reconstitution of the Confederacy is significant ; 
Greece began to seek union, and under the leadership of Athens.* 
It is not our task here to follow the fortunes of this second 
Confederacy, but its constitution and ideals and its fate all bear 
upon the matter in hand — the change that is coming over the 
Greek world. Eduard Meyer holds that it was bound to fail— - 

^ Xen. Hellenica, v. 4, 32. 

2 So he told Philip thirty-four years after [Philip, 84) . More in the 
same vein [Antid. 57, 61, 87). Who would not be a patriot that read 
the Panegyric ? asks Dionysius of Halicarnassus [Isocrates, c 5, § 544). 

3 Cf. Plut. Vit. 837 c. 

* Wilamowitz, Ar. und A then. ii. 381, and E. Meyer, Gr. Gesch. v. 
§923, speak with emphasis of the part played by the speech — without 
this preparation of public opinion the Confederacy would have been 
unthinkable. 



"\\ JO SUIOS pTSq 9ABII X-BUI sd'BJ:}.'BS SIH 'SBJOS-BAg IJ.SUT'bS'B jbm 

siq uo si^uGfBi^ ooo'Si :^uads saxjox-ei^JV sA-bs (09 Sva^) sarj.'BJoosi ^ 

•(3 'i7l) sAbS Vt1{0U/Cl{A/CxQ 

votudjipjj JO Jot[:jn'B aq:^ sb JtoB^s sb sbm Sut^ 8q:^ ji u9A9 'q.sn[ si stqx 
'5^/LUdoX SB Sui]a :}.B9J-Q aq:;. q:^TAv ajdoad :^sutbSb Suipu9:).uoo x'BJauaS b 
JO s9T:nnogjip aq:^ uo 'S? '^IPIV s^qo-i'eq.njtj ui ^^jbiuqj pooS b si ojsqx s 

•2 'eg -I -onqx s 
•:;uaui9:).B:).s siq:^. joj S90U9 
-J9J9J ou :^uBAv. \\\IA. ddpuvxsjy fo sisvqvuy s^uBiJiy jo j9pB9J 9qx t 

•U0U03 JO uos 9q:^ loj §m:^;gun A^piEq s^m siqi ;nq 'qdtajqs 
s^Sui;^ 9q; p9J9;u9 'so9q;ouiTX 'i'ej9U9§ u'eiu9q:^V 9q:^ 'puspj 
siq j9;bi 51-69^ M9J y g-sBJoSBAg; :^sinBSB sdooj; :^99jf) S9sn 
^^IX 9^1 ^^^^ s:^u9Ui-Bi s9;bjoosi ogC SB A\re^ sy •bisj9(J 
tips SBM piJoM 9q:). JO j9Mod A9U01U :^B9J§ 9q; ing -suoi^ip 

-UOD M9U 9q| UIOJJ 9Sj9lU9 93Uud >[99Jf) tnjss909ns ^SJIJ 9q:^ 

MBS Aipig puB 's9A|9SUI9q:^ p9Avoqs :^sjg jbm jo s9jn:^B9j av9U 
9q; :^Bq:^ ^U^IS ^ ^^^ ^I '^^ p9]jJBo 9q :^qSim :^i qoiqM j9Ao 
P9U9PTAV 9§uBJ 9q; SB AnBp9ds9 — ^ A9uom 9J0in tn;s :^SOD 
JBM Ajn;u90 q:^inoj 9q:^ ux 8'B:^jBds sbm :^i spjBMj9;jB puB 
'su9q;y SBM j9Mod :^Bq:^ 'm p9dd9:^s bisj9<j \\i'\ 'puB 'S|99y :^so| jo 
2mpimq9j: 9q:^ dn d99>[ :^S9Suo| ppoo :^Bqi j9Mod 9qi o:^ {^^j 
o; SBM AiopiA qoiqM m 'jb^ UBisguuodopj 9qi. jo 9SjnoD 
9q:^ Aq :^no 9UJoq SutAbs b — ^ 93UBug jo sb suijb jo jibjjb 
UB qonui OS :^ou si jbm :^Bq; SuiAbs sb s9pipAonqx Aq p9:^U9S 
-9jd9j ST 'B:^jBds JO §ui>[ 'souiBpiqojy U9A9 Ajn;u9D q;jif 9q; uj 

•S9IJBU9DJ9UI Aq uo p9IJJB0 ST JBM pUB 'p95iqSTp 9IB 9399 Jf) 
•J9pp 9q:^ UT S9TA9t [BUOT|B^ 'UT 9TnOD S9UT§U9 9S9IS pUB 

x*JBM JO 9jn:^B9j :^B9jS b st 9S91S 9q| Ajn;u90 q^Jtioj 9q; ut :|.ng[ 
•;t p9;diU9:^;B j9A9u AtsnoTjo:^ou B^jBdg \ suoTSU9inTp Aub 
JO uMo:^ B JO 9§9TS pjss9DDns B MBS A|pjBq Ajn:^U9D qijij 9qx 
•ss9UTsnq s^:^sqBp9ds b jo 9joiu jb9A Ai9A9 9q 0| SutmojS sbm 
JB^ -JBM JO s^oo; 9q:^ uodn ppq §uoj:^s b 9ABq i^sirin j9Mod 

^UBUTlUOp 9q| 'n^ JO :^SJT^ •AJBSS999U 9J9M 'jB9p AjSuTMOjS 

SBM :^T 'suoT:^BOijT];Bnb utb:^j90 'p^JOM 9q:^ 9;Tun ppoqs ;Bq; 9q 
oj SBM j9Mod 9q; J9A9:^BqM ;ng -Jiooijno ub 9pTM OS :^ou pBq 
;u9muj9Ao2 ApouTjd di\\[\^ 9J0j9q puB \ ^ p9|dm9;:^B A^pjBq 
9rTSB9i IBJ9P9J 9qj ! ppOM :^[99JQ 9q:^ JO Auoui9§9q 9q; utbj9J o; 
P91TBJ 9;b:^s-A;p 9qx •diqsj9pB9| jo 9U0 sbm iU9{qojd 9qx 

•9|qTSSodmT U99q 9ABq mou Aq ppoM S9pu9(j 
JO qo99d^ lBJ9un^ 9qj Aiqm9ssB UBTU9q;y ub ui u9A9 sdBqj9d 



1 



•(/6 'ii) suBiqi^iCos oq:^ :^noq'B sfj-emaj 

•UOTSS-Bd -B :).qSTJ 9:^'B:).g op'Bin q.'eq:). suoir^'Bposs'B 
puB suoiq.ip'BJ:!. pp Gq::). pauiraip QA-eq 'i^-S-ed aqq. o:;. Ajqa-bis jo uoTc^'eSapj 
oqq. q:;.iM j3q:^92o:). 'S9:^'b:^s uj[9:).S9^ 9q:^ jo raaq:). mojj s:^siuopo Aq r^uaui 
-9j:).;9S 9q:^ puB 'S9:|.'b:^s uj9:^s'Eg; 9q:^ o:^ut gdojna; uiojj uoi:^'BjSTmini x 

di|Tqj ji JO 'ogC m suaq^v ji *s;stsui S9:^'bjdosi qoiqAV uo §uii[:^ 
;sjg 9qx z </PPO^ 9^^ 9FJ 0| ^W^ 9q ppOM '9|'b:^s 9uo o:^ut 
P91UJ0J 9q ppoD :^i JI „ 'q:).oq jo s:^jtS iBn:^ijTds 9q:). SuiJ-Bqs puE 
*BisY puB gdojtig U99M;9q SmA^ *9i:^o:^suy piES 'goBJ 5[99J0 
9^X *uoT|'ej9do-OD Ji9q:). ;on ji :^U9Suoo jpq:^ :^SBd\ :^'b Suiuuim 
JO 'p9pi 9q; §ui;squ9 jo j9Mod 9UI0S SEM — puij o; :^S9pj'eq 
9q:^ sdEqjgd — jgpj M9U 9q:). joj uopBogqBtib q^Jtioj 9qx 

•u-BUio^ JO 'u'Bq9qx 'uB^jBdg m putioj Aj5[9mb 
:^ou A^p^d^o B '9jn;'Bu jo qi^dgp gmos :^uB9m 5[sb:^ b qons 
•9SB:^TJ9q pipu9[ds siqi joj 99:^snj:^ 9q ;snm pui5[U'Bm 9pmS 
puB 9pj o:j. SBM oqAV 9q puB 'pm>[UBin jo uoT:^BDnp9 ub 'sbav 
puB 'U99q pBq su9q;v ' ;qSiJ sbm S9pTJ9(j •snra9§ 5[99Jf) jo 
s:^U9m9A9iqoB ;b9J§ 9q:^ joj Suq99j :^U9§in9|m ub 9ABq :^snm 9jj 
•uoT^BzqtAiD puB 9Jti:qnD ui 9P999J |0u ppoqs pui^^uBin :^Bq:^ 
9jnD9S o:^ 9tqB 9q :^snm J9|nj 9jn:^nj 9q:^ '93B|d pjiq:^ 9qi uj 

•uoT|Bn;is 
-pjjoM B §mdsBJ§ JO j9Mod siq puB S9iq:^BdinAs siq jo Abm gq:^ 
m poo;s s:^U9raq3B|:^B {bdoi s,>[99J9 9qx x'^^^^^^^P'^ ^11^ 
p9Dnp9j A[:^B9j§ 9q :^ou pjnoo :^t ;Bq:^ Abs ppoM suopBjgdo S|i 
q3:^BM oqM sj9uSi9J0j M9J ABp-o; i 9iqissod BoiJ9ray jo S9|b;s 
Ps^Pn ^^^ 9pBm A:^uSi9J9Aos 9|B|S •snoj9SuBp mojS puB 
ujOAv:^no 9JB *Abp Jpq:^ m 9tqB|TA9ui puB Ajbss9D9U U99q 9ABq 
:^Bq; 'S90UBAij;uoo {BOTi^qod u9qA\ s9iuoo 91111:^ 9qx 'S^ugjBd 
pjss9Dons JO :).b9jS jo suos 9q; Suouib jBqiuiBjun ;ou siS9Ui9jsj 
B — p9:^Tiuq Aj9A Buiiuo39q 9J9M s5[99Jf) 9q:^ ' 90U9Sq|9:^m 
puB 5[oot:).no m pg^imii 9JB U9m :^so]/\[ 'uiiq 9J0j9q uoT:^Bn|TS 
9q; m s:^u9m9p M9u J9q;o gq:^ puB ppoM 9qi jo A;iun 9q;^ 
9znB9J o:^ ^qSism puB 9DU9Sqp:^UT {Boir^qod q§nou9 9ABq :^snxu 
9|nj o:^ SBM j9A9oq^ •90UTjd JO 'tpunoD JO 'S0UI9P J9q:^9qAV 

*J9pJ 9q:^ UI 5[00|:|.nO 9piAV pUB '§U0J;S 'jB9p 9mOS SBAV p|JOM 

:^199JQ 9q| JO AuoiU9S9q 9q:^ joj qj|B9M sb ;uB|jodmi sb r^ng 

•suBpijqod 
'sj9iptos 'sdiqs— Atiq ppoo 9q ':^q§noq 9q o; sbm j9A9:^BqM 
puB 'BISJ9J JO Sui;^ 9q| qjiM q:qB9M ui 9j9duioo ptnoo 9U0 o^ 

69^ i NViNozaa 'ONIE hoihm naaNn 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 385 

it looked backward to the past ; it was a restoration, and like 
all restorations it aimed at a theoretical ideal, ignoring the 
actual ; right and might were unevenly divided in it — all had 
rights, one alone had any considerable might ; it must fail. 
This is not altogether just. There is no denying that the in- 
spiration came from the past. Every Athenian, who thought 
of the project in 377, remembered the Confederacy that began 
to fall to pieces in 413, whether he was old enough to have 
witnessed that evil day or not. It was very Uke the old Con- 
federacy again — with Persia honourably recognized ; that was 
involved in what Cleon once called ''the conditions under 
which we live.'* But it has another aspect — it was something 
of a step toward Federalism. And it touched the actual very 
closely in the statement of its aims — " that the Spartans may 
allow the Greeks to continue in peace, free and autonomous, 
and in secure enjoyment of their own lands." ^ The lines were 
carefully drawn to exclude those features of the former league 
that had lent themselves to oppression and had meant 
inequality. There were to be no " cleruchies " — the resolution 
proposed in the Ecclesia by Aristoteles, and carried, forbade 
any Athenian to buy, acquire, or take in mortgage any house or 
land in any territory of the allies on any excuse or in any way.^ 
It would even appear from a sentence in a speech of Isocrates 
of the year 373 that Athenians actually renounced any such 
possessions which they held at the time.^ So one of the great 
grievances of the alHes in the old days was done away with, 
and " tribute *' (<t>6po^) went with it in the same resolution. 
No magistrate and no garrison should be placed in any aUied 
town ; every community should have complete Home Rule, 
"free and autonomous, with whatever constitution it shall 
choose." Such was to be the freedom of the allies of Athens. 
For the general purposes of the Confederacy and the safe- 
guarding of its freedom, its government was to be vested in 
what to-day we should call two houses — the Athenian Ecclesia 
and a Synedrion, or council, of alHes sitting in Athens. The 
Synedroi of the Allies are already mentioned in the resolution of 
Aristoteles. Each state, whatever its size, was to have one 
vote, just as each of the United States of America sends two 

1 Hicks and Hill, No. loi, 1. 9. * Hicks and Hill, No. 1 01, 1. 36. 

' Isocrates, Plataicos, 44. 
25 



386 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

senators to Washington.^ This Federal Council gave its 
opinion on questions of foreign policy, war, peace, alliances — 
the placing of a garrison in an allied town, the use of the funds 
of the League — and it might try any Athenian who broke the 
law by acquiring property in an allied state. The institution 
of such a Council shows one of the tendencies of the age. Long 
ago Thales had urged some sort of federal combination upon 
the attention of the lonians ; ^ and in the later years of the 
Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes had advocated closer relations 
with the allies — something, again, in the federal way ; but the 
war had gone too far, and the allies were thinking of freedom, 
nor did Athens entertain the idea. But now, as we shall see, 
Federalism was in the air, and the second Confederacy is 
essentially a compromise between the old Empire, somewhat 
disguised perhaps, and the new Federation. 

The Confederacy never reached the brilliance or the power 
of the former one. Compromise was in its charter — it was 
not the old Empire with a clearly recognized headship ; it 
was not a new League on the lines of strxct equality ; it had 
at once too much head and not enough. Points no doubt 
were clear to the allies which time has dimmed for us, but 
many points in such an undertaking are obscured of set 
purpose at first or only come to light afterwards ; the exact 
relations of the parties in a confederacy are always difficult to 
determine. Athens and America have had to fight to determine 
one point — can a member of a confederacy withdraw when it 
pleases, whether the rest consent or not ? And what, a Greek 
would ask, is autonomy or freedom, if it cannot ? Consent 
is one of the first difficulties in the story of this league as of 
every other that Greeks made. 

Behind the problem of consent was another — finance. 
Tribute had been abolished — the word was odious ; but 
funds were needed, and the Athenian statesman Callistratos 
invented the happy term Contribution ((TvvTa^t,<;), which 
avoided some associations. But whoever arranged the con- 

1 Diodorus, xv. 28. 

^ Herodotus, i. 170, Thales efceXeue ei^ (BovXevTrjpiov "lavas €KT^(r6aiy TO 
8e elvat iv Teco* Tecoj/ yap fxicrov eivai 'Icavirjs. ras de aXKas rroKias oiKCOfxevas 
fxi^Bev rjaa-ov voal^edOai Kardrrep el SrjfxoL eiev. A sort of unity waS imposed 
on Ionia by Artaphrenes (Herodotus, vi. 42) . 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 387 

tributions, whatever share each state represented in the 
Federal Coimcil may have had in fixing or assessing them, 
they were after all taxes, and no one wanted to pay them. 
Cities would pay them to Phocion, his biographer tells us, 
for they trusted him ; and Isocrates says that Timotheos 
alone among the Athenian generals managed to get through 
without complaints against Athens — " while he was general 
you cannot find that there were revolts, nor changes of con- 
stitutions, nor massacres, nor exiles, nor any other of the 
irremediable evils." The praise of Timotheos is a revelation 
of troubles — the orator writes in 353 with the Social War 
in his memory. The contributions failed — the}^ produced 
wars and ruinous expenditure. Athenian armies were com- 
posed of mercenaries — men without cities, runaway slaves, 
the clotted rascality of everywhere, always ready to desert 
for higher pay ; and these soldiers plundered wherever they 
went, and '* we have to do despite to our own allies and 
wring tribute out of them, to provide the pay for these common 
enemies of mankind '' ; so says Isocrates, pleading for the 
Peace of 355 ; they get the loot, and the state gets the ill will.^ 
Their generals, as Demosthenes says, go off on private wars 
of their own where they and their soldiers have better chances 
of plunder. 2 The Confederacy had, it appears, no federal 
executive ; Athens supplied what was needed in that way, 
with the advantage of control and the disadvantage of un- 
popularity, and in the long run the latter outweighed the 
former. 

The new League gave Athens once more a predominant 
position in the Aegaean, but it was costly. Meanwhile Sparta 
was losing ground in her war with Thebes, for Thebes was 
rising in power. As she rose, inter-state relations readjusted 
themselves, and Athens and Sparta drew together. So at 
last the proposal was made to have peace — once more on the 
basis of the King's rescript. And then came an enormous 
change. For Sparta forbade the Theban envoys to sign for 
Boeotia, and they would sign on no other terms. The battle 
of Leuctra followed (371), and Spartan ascendancy was gone 
for ever. Epameinondas invaded the Peloponnese again and 
again, and new nations sprang up around Sparta — the old 

* Isocrates, de Pace, 28, 46, 125. ''Demosthenes, 2, Olynth. 28. 



386 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

communities of Arcadians and Eleians whom she had crushed, 
the forgotten Messenians whom she had turned into Helots. 
New cities rose, and a new nationaHsm inspired their builders 
— it was the King's Peace with a vengeance, every com- 
munity autonomous, but not now " conveniently for the 
Spartans," and never again. 

The hegemony of Thebes need not long delay us. In 
spite of the interest that the final collapse of Sparta, the 
great military gifts of Epameinondas, and the revival of the 
nations in the Peloponnese awake, there are no new ideas 
in Theban ascendancy. The main object is to secure what 
Sparta had lost and by the same means — by the division of 
city from city, the real cause for the liberation and recon- 
stitution of Arcadia and Messenia — by garrisons, by political 
propaganda, by reliance on Persia.^ There is nothing new 
here — simply " the reoccupation of lines proved twice already 
to be untenable," with Thebes as " the Prussia of Boeotia." ^ 
Thebes contributed little or nothing to the settlement of the 
real problems that vexed the Greek world, and when her 
last great victory was won at Mantineia in 362 at the cost of 
the life of her greatest citizen, there is nothing to add to the 
words with which Xenophon ends his Hellenica — " disorder 
and confusion became yet greater after the battle than before 
in Greece. So far, then, let my story go ; what follows may 
perhaps be another's care.'* It has been suggested that the 
battle of Aegospotami was the real end of the Greek city- 
state ; the King's Peace, with its insistence on autonomy 
for everybody, is another date for marking that event ; but 
perhaps Xenophon' s is as good as any. The last experiment 
had been made ; Greece had failed to unite herself, and there 
was no hope of it from within. Inside of three years a prince 
ascended a foreign throne, who did it. 

The rule of the city-state had failed, leaving behind it a 
record, for ever amazing, of glory and incompetence, brilliance, 
power, and oppression. It remains to us to look briefly at 
the new movements which are beginning to be observed. 

1 Cf . Isocrates, Philip, 53-55, on the meddling and muddling of 
Thebes ; and Archid. 66, on the misery and disorder of the Peloponnese, 

2 W. S. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, p. 26. Beloch, Gr. Gesch» 
i. 290, on Epameinondas. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 389 

They will not hold us long, for detail is wanting, and even if it 
were abundant, it is the idea, so far, rather than the execution 
of it that is interesting. 

The passion of every Greek city — the greater perhaps, 
the smaller the city — was what we have called autopolitanism ; 
they would be " citizens of themselves '* avToiroXirav, make 
their own laws, choose their own magistrates, and perhaps 
even stamp their own currency. But new conditions assert 
themselves and bear down old traditions. The little com- 
munity might not be safe in these new times — it was too much 
at the mercy of neighbours near at hand or across the sea, or 
even of chance fleets and the commanders of passing armies. 
Some kind of union might be safer. So in several ways 
cautious attempts were made to find that ideal union which 
should combine the safety of the whole and the maximum 
of independence for the parts. 

The first plan was what the Greeks called synoecism, 
the joining of houses, or, in English, the combination of a 
number of small towns, hamlets, or cantons into one city. 
Theseus, according to Athenian belief, was the first author 
of this plan, and Athens was the city he made of many small 
items and units. Another form of synoecism is that adopted 
by the birds in the play of Aristophanes — they had never 
had city or town at all, and they begin with an immense one. 
Something of this kind would seem to have been tried by the 
Messenians, when the battle of Leuctra suddenly set them 
free from the Spartans after centuries of helotage with no 
traditions and no local jealousies. The great city-foundations 
of Alexander and his successors are still more like that of the 
birds — a great founder, a huge wall, and citizens from every- 
where. But such foundations are obviously different from 
the attempts at union made by existing communities. 

Rhodes is the great example of successful work on these 
lines. Toward the end of the Peloponnesian War (408) the 
three cities of the island were combined and a new city built, 
which took the island's name and made it more famous. 
Hippodamos of Miletos, who planned the Peiraieus when it was 
laid out, is said to have designed the new Rhodes, but this is 
not certain. 1 What matters more is, that, with ups and downs 
^ See F. Haverfield, Ancient Town-Planning, pp. 31, 32. 



390 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

of fortune, among Spartans, Athenians, Carians, and Persians, 
all watchful and eager to rule city and island, Rhodes throve 
and had a significant history — commerce, wealth, and even 
empire. She won herself a great position among the con- 
tending kingdoms of the Successors, and developed a maritime 
law, some part of which the Romans adopted. Nor was she 
without glory in art and literature. 

The story of Megalopolis, founded by the Arcadians when 
Sparta was crushed at Leuctra, is not so glorious, for here 
complications came in. Arcadia was not an island, and allies 
had always been at hand to foment the quarrels of Mantineia 
and Tegea, and the factions of the parties in each of them and 
in every other Arcadian commune ; and, as we have seen, the 
country was very much at the disposal of Sparta. Lycomedes, 
the Arcadian statesman, dreamed of a new age — a free and 
independent and united Arcadia. He planned a real Federal 
Government with a wider scope than had yet been sought — a 
free and equal union of the whole of Arcadia, the cities to be 
constituent free commonwealths, neither subje^cts nor parishes, 
with a Koivov or Federal Assembly — " and whatever should be 
carried in the Koinon should be valid for all the cities " — 
Federal magistrates and a Federal army.^ How he managed 
to inspire the Arcadians with a new sense of nationality is told 
by Xenophon. Xenophon had fought his way through Asia 
with an army largely Arcadian and apt to be conscious that 
it was Arcadian, and his account of Lycomedes has a tone of 
irony.2 Lycomedes, then, was a Mantineian, of no great origin, 
but well-to-do and ambitious ; and he *' filled the Arcadians 
with pride, telling them that they were the only people really 
native to the Peloponnese, the only real children of the land, 
the largest tribe of Greece and the strongest in physique — 
yes, and the most valiant, too, for whenever any wished mer- 
cenary soldiers, they preferred Arcadians to all. ^ The Spartans 
had never yet invaded Athens without them, and nowadays 
the Theban never went without Arcadians to Sparta. . . . The 
Arcadians on hearing all this were quite puffed up — they had 
the highest enthusiasm for Lycomedes ; he was their one man 
(fiovov dvSpa). So they appointed as magistrates the persons of 

1 Freeman, Federal Government, pp. 155 ff . ; Pausanias, viii. 27. 

2 Xen. Hellenica, vii. i, 23-25 ; cf. Anab. vi. 2, 9 if. ; 3, 1-9. ^ Cf . p. 239. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 391 

his selection, and as a result of what followed the Arcadians 
grew great. . . . Wherever they resolved to go, neither night, 
nor storm, nor distance, nor mountain barrier stopped them." 
Xenophon does not record the founding of Megalopolis, but 
he mentions meetings and resolutions of the '* Ten Thousand," 
as people called the Koinon, and he alludes to " magistrates 
of the Arcadians," to " Aeneas of Stymphalos, general of the 
Arcadians," the tribal name replacing the old city-names. The 
fortunes of the Arcadians do not concern us here, but their 
experiment was a striking one — the symbol of a new age. 

Other experiments were not quite so successful. What the 
Olynthians designed we only learn from their worst enemies. 
Acanthian envoys came to Sparta and denounced them for 
their endeavour to absorb their neighbours into an amalgama- 
tion where all would use the same laws, and have mutual 
rights of holding property in each other's lands and cities as 
well as of intermarriage, and all should be citizens together 
((TVfjL7ro\iTev6tv). The Acanthians and others preferred to be 
" citizens of themselves," and Sparta, as we have seen, joined 
them in breaking up the Olynthian confederacy. It is not 
altogether clear whether the Olynthians purposed a real 
federal union or some such absorption of neighbours as Rome 
achieved in Latium and Athens long before in Attica. The 
sad touch about King Amyntas of Macedon *' all but expelled 
from the whole of Macedonia " strikes the reader oddly, who 
is familiar with the events of later reigns in those regions.^ 

The strangest union of all was that of Argos and Corinth, 
which it is hard to understand from what is told us. Xenophon 
represents the views of the opposition — Corinth was really 
being blotted off the map [a^avL^ofxevr^v), the boundary 
marks were gone, Corinth was Argos, the Corinthians Argives, 
little better than resident aliens or me tics in their own city. 2 
It is a curious illustration of the decline of Corinth in forty 
years. The Corinthians had driven the Spartans to take the 
sword in 432 ; and they had perished with the sword — 

&>s aiToKoiTO KOi aKKos oris Toiavrd ye pi^oi. 

The incorporation of Corinth would have made a very strong 
power — for mainland Greek purposes — of Argos ; but such a 

1 Xen. Hellenica, v. 2, 11-19, the speech of the Acanthians. 
- Xen. Hellenica, iv. 4. The union was in the year 393 or 392. 



392 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

new era as Rhodes saw was more easily attained on an island 
and by cities with smaller pretensions. 

A fragmentary inscription reveals another sort of union 
between cities. Phocaea and Mitylene established a mone- 
tary union of some sort, each covenanting to coin alternately. 
The fragment we possess of their agreement deals with penalties 
upon the moneyer if his alloy contains too little gold or, in the 
metaphor of that day, is ** too watery." Such a convention 
falls very far short of a political or federal union, but it 
indicates a factor making for unity. The coins of Byzantium 
and Chalcedon show that these two cities must have had a 
somewhat similar agreement.^ 

The most real examples of Federalism, however, seem to 
occur among the Greek peoples reckoned backward and behind 
their neighbours — peoples who had little urban life, but con- 
tinued on old lines in communes and cantons. Little is known 
of their systems and arrangements, but federal government 
of greater or less extent, of one kind and another, would appear 
to have existed at this time in Acarnania, Epirus, Phocis, and 
Thessaly. In the period that follows that under consideration, 
Phocis and Thessaly played great parts in shaping the eventual 
destiny of Greece, but it was hardly as federal unions that 
they did so. The great Leagues of Greece, the Achaean, and 
the Aetolian, belong to a later age, and they too were develop- 
ments among peoples whose cities were relatively unimportant. 

Summing up broadly such facts as these, we can clearly 
recognize the emergence of a new tendency toward some kind 
of Federalism. Once more it means that men were beginning 
to feel that the city-state, as they had known it, whether 
small, compact, and autonomous, or large and imperial, was 
growing out of date. It had served its time, but by now, 
bitterly as men resented anything else, it was obsolescent. 
To emphasize it meant to retard the progress of the world 
toward a goal, not yet seen, but divined, when the influence 
of Greece among the nations should be greater and wider, but 
different. To reach that goal Greece needed the union, which 
the federalists were quietly seeking in one corner and another ; 
but she needed another sort of headship, more effective and 

1 Hicks and Hill, No. 94. Hill, Handbook of Greek and Roman 
Coins, pp. 103 ff. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 393 

more enlightened. And this brings us once more to the 
Prince. 

Toward the end of the Peloponnesian War the attention 
of the Greeks was called in a new way to Macedonia. The 
king had died in 413, and his legitimate heirs had been swept 
aside — killed, it was said, in the most commonplace and vulgar 
style — by an illegitimate member of the family.^ There was 
nothing new in this among the outskirt peoples, but Archelaos 
was a forerunner of greater men. He was a man of action, and 
with Athenian aid recovered the national port of Pydna, and 
set about developing his kingdom. He trained an army of 
hoplites and cavalry, he built fortresses all over his realm and 
laid out straight roads, and acquired a military strength 
beyond the eight kings who preceded him.^ And then he 
set about another task — the introduction of Macedon into 
the circle of Greek culture. He built a palace and got 
Zeuxis to come and paint in it for him. He invited the great 
poets of Greece to live with him, and they came — Agathon of 
Athens, Timotheos of Miletus, and, most amazing fact of all, 
Euripides, who, it would appear, wrote the Bacchae at his 
court. Hippocrates of Cos, the great physician, also came 
and settled. The king instituted a national festival at Dion 
with gymnastic and musical contests in the Greek style. He 
began to expand at the cost of his neighbours, but this the 
Spartans, who were not heralds of Greek culture, stopped ; 
and then the king was murdered in the Macedonian way in 
399, and his kingdom was to be fought for and held as might 
be by whoever of the family could get it, and it was forty years 
before Macedon saw his like. 

In Sicily something similar but perhaps even more striking 
had taken place. Before the Peloponnesian War was over, 
Egesta, the city which had called in the Athenians and launched 
them on their disastrous expedition against Syracuse, was 
left in the direst need, and this time called in a more dangerous 
national enemy. ^ How far the Carthaginian invasion of Sicily 

^ Plato, Gorg. 471 a, a vigorous passage by Polus, ironically urging on 
Socrates that Archelaos must be miserable, but every Athenian envies him. 

2 Thuc. ii. 100. 

^ Xen. Hellenica, i. i, ^y ; 5, 21. Meltzner, Gesch. der Karthager, 
i. p. 256. 



394 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

was worked in concert with the Persian plans of intervention 
in the Aegaean, it might be idle to guess. Carthage and 
Phoenicia can never have been without communications, and 
even if there were no understanding between the powers, any 
government as able as that of Carthage would have recognized 
an opportunity so promising. Sicily was involved in a series 
of Punic wars and sieges, and out of the chaos rose the tyrant 
Dionysius. In the course of a long reign he had four wars 
with Carthage, generally crowned with victory. He built up 
an empire of the sea and ruled Sicily and Southern Italy and 
the Adriatic, with the regions about Ancona and Venice ; and 
he made Syracuse the foremost military and naval power of 
the Greek world. ^ His wars with his siege engines and his 
armies of mercenaries marked a development in warfare. 
Whatever might be said of his character and his treatment of 
other Greeks, it remained that he stood for the Hellenic name, 
and in an age when the older Greece was falling conspicuously 
under the control of the great King, he drove back the Oriental 
in the West, Both Athens and Sparta courted him and sought 
his friendship. He stood for culture too. The adventures 
of Plato at his court are another story ; they do not quite 
show us the philosopher king. Dionysius was a poet, rather 
— a tragic poet, who won prizes at Athens with his tragedies, 
a victory for art tempered by diplomacy it may be, but grateful 
to a monarch whose poems had been howled down at Olympia. 
What followed his death in Sicily showed what he had been 
—a protagonist of the Greek — bloodstained and unsatisfactory, 
but a champion of civilization, and effective for culture and 
Hellenism as no democracy or oligarchy of the Greek world 
could ever hope to be again. ^ 

In the eastern Mediterranean a much more attractive 
figure meets us.^ At Salamis in Cyprus in the fifth century 
there still reigned the house of Teucer, but a Phoenician exile, 
trusted by the Teucrid king, " cast forth his benefactor and 

^ Isocrates, Philip, 65 ; Archid. 44-45. 

2 The reader may remark the contrast with what Thucydides had 
written of tyrants of an earHer age (i. 17), though he already makes 
something of an exception of SiciHan tyrants. 

2 For what follows about Evagoras, see Judeich, Kleinasiatische 
Studien, though his dates are confused and wrong, as Meyer shows. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 395 

seized the kingdom himself . . . and, wishing to secure himself, 
he barbarized the city and enslaved the whole island to the 
Great King." But in process of time a boy was born to the 
Teucrid house and named Evagoras. Disaster befell the 
Phoenician rulers from one of their own family who tried to 
make all sure by killing the young Teucrid. But he escaped, 
and then with fifty followers (as those say who set the number 
at the highest) he came back, and, by one of those chances 
familiar in the stories of the Successors of Alexander and of the 
Presidents and Dictators in South America, he got into Salamis 
one night by a postern in the wall and marched directly upon 
the palace. In the confusion that followed the citizens looked 
on while the foreigner's servants fought the returning exile, 
but he beat them and ** won back for his race the honours of 
their house and made himself tyrant of the city. . . . And 
all men will own that of blessings god or man can give the 
greatest is a tyranny, the most august, and above all others 
the prize of ambition." Such is the romantic story told by 
Isocrates,^ and such his reflection upon it, and both seem to 
take us far from the Athens of Pericles. 

The return of Evagoras may have been in 411 ; and the 
government of Persia, alv/ays rather slipshod in its way, was 
preoccupied with the Peloponnesian War, and then with a 
change of rulers and the rebellion of Cyrus and one thing and 
another, so that the king of Salamis had perhaps twenty years 
to set his kingdom in order. He was already a friend of the 
Athenians, and when the great disaster befell them at Aegos- 
potami, Conon sailed away at once to Salamis, and other 
refugees followed him. ** Many Greeks of good family (/caXol 
Kayadol) came and settled in Cyprus considering the mon- 
archic rule of Evagoras lighter and more law-abiding than the 
constitutions they left behind them " ^ — Lysander's decarchies 
are possibly meant. Evagoras pursued a strong Hellenizing 
policy. " He found the city thoroughly barbarized. Phoe- 
nician rule had excluded the Greeks ; the arts were unknown ; 
there was no emporion, no harbour ; " ^ ^^t Evagoras made a 

^ Evag, 19-40. This glorification of a -'tyrant" contrasts strangely 
with the judgment of Thucydides (i. 17) ; but the two writers are 
looking at different circumstances as well as from different outlooks. 

* Isocrates, Evag. 51. * Isocrates, Evag. 47. 



396 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

Greek city of it, fortified it, built a fleet, and so increased it 
that it fell short of none among those of the Greeks. Greek 
became the fashion, everybody was Philhellen — it was a matter 
of rivalry. Men took Greek wives, and cultivated music and 
the higher studies of Athens. And when at last Spartan 
tyranny and insolence provoked the Persian to action, Conon 
had a friend and supporter in Evagoras in carrying through the 
great scheme of freedom to the battle of Cnidos, and achieving 
Greek freedom and the restoration to Athens of her old glory, 
or some part of it.^ 

After this came the wars between Evagoras and Artaxerxes, 
which, following the example of Isocrates, we may lightly 
pass over, for the king of Salamis was reduced at one time to 
terrible straits. Artaxerxes, we are told, was more in earnest 
about this war than any other, and counted Evagoras a more 
serious antagonist than Cyrus. ^ The Persian operations were on 
an enormous scale ; we read of forces of 300,000 men, and we 
are told that the war cost the Great King 15,000 talents and 
more. But " in the end Evagoras so sated them with war, 
that though the tradition had always been that the King was 
never reconciled to any that revolted till he had him a prisoner, 
they were glad to make peace, and waived this law of theirs, 
and did not disturb the rule of Evagoras." ^ In three years 
the Persian King took away the Empire of vSparta, but after ten 
years he left Evagoras master of what he had before they went 
to war.* So history is written for the sons of kings. In plain 
fact, so far as we can put it together, the Persian, in Thucy- 
dides' phrase, once more " tripped over himself," and owed his 
disasters to the curious independence with which his generals 
arranged their relations with the enemy and with one another. 
None the less Evagoras died king of Salamis. 

Now glance at the history of Greece. In the middle of this 
war or series of wars in C3^rus the King's Peace was sent down 
by Antalkidas, and in it the King claimed Cyprus ; and Sparta 
readily enough and Athens reluctantly had to abandon the 
Cypriot Greeks. Think of the folly of abandoning such a man 
to the barbarian ! is the cry of Isocrates at the time, especially 
when " of the forces of Tiribazos the most serviceable of the 

1 Isocrates, Evag. 52-56. ^ Isocrates, Evag. 58. 

* Isocrates, Evag. 6$. * Isocrates, Evag. 64. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 397 

infantry have been gathered from these regions and the most 
of his fleet has sailed from Ionia." ^ Greek as ever against 
Greek, and the mercenaries hired by the enemy of the nation 
— when, if Greece would but unite, the King of the Persians 
would be so easy to overthrow, once he had no more Greek 
soldiers. But it was not to be, for the last Darius put thousands 
of them into the field against Alexander. 

What was the moral of it ? Why could an Archelaos lift 
a state out of barbarism, almost into Hellenism ? a Dionysius 
rescue the western Greek world from Semitic Orientals ? an 
Evagoras alone and at bay wring peace out of an Artaxerxes 
and maintain the Hellenism he had created ? and a Jason, a 
Hecatomnos, a Maussollos — nay, a Mania and the princes of 
Panticapaeum — ^why is it everywhere the same, while the 
fellow-citizens of Leonidas and Themistocles can manage 
nothing but to thwart one another and worry and betray the 
rest of the Greeks ? 

Centuries later Tacitus tells us how the Romans, summing 
up the work of Augustus, recognized that " no resource had 
been left for a distracted country but the rule of one man." ^ 
They were right, and it was as true of Greece in the period 
under our review. We need not rehearse the story again. 
The superiority of monarchy in plan and action is discussed 
by Isocrates in his Nicocles — it is evident, he says, at once if 
you will look at monarchy and democracy in operation.^ The 
whole piece is a pamphlet in defence of monarchy, but what it 
means in reality is brought out with the utmost clearness in 
the " speech " known as the Philip. It is an address to Philip 
of Macedon, written in 346, and it is sent to him because of 
signal advantages he alone possesses for the service of Greece. 
Other men, famous men, are " under cities and laws," with 
nothing possible for them but to do as they are told ; " you 
alone have great authority given you by Destiny (rvxv) — to 
send ambassadors to whom you will, to receive them from whom 
you think fit, to say what you think advantageous ; you are 
in possession of wealth moreover and of power, such as no 
Greek ever had — the only things there are that can both 

1 Isocrates, Paneg. 134, 135. Of. Philip, 125, 126. 

2 Tacitus, Annals, i. 9. 

* Isocrates, Nicocles, 17. 



398 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 

persuade and compel." ^ Philip certainly had a freedom of 
action and a power that no other had. Demosthenes saw this 
as clearly as anybody, but Isocrates and he felt differently. 
All that Demosthenes stood for, all that he believed in, all 
that he was — to Isocrates it is all chatter, madness, tedium, 
and the betrayal of Greece. He is sick of the city-state and 
its leaders and its empire, and all the confusion they make, 
the blood they shed, the wasting of the life of man, the aban- 
donment of the real work and glory of Hellas. He is done with 
them. His pamphlet is a counterblast of hostility and re- 
nunciation to Demosthenes and his friends and his ideals. ^ 
He addresses himself to that prince whom Demosthenes has 
been attacking for the last five years as the enemy of Greece. 
Philip can do what he sees to be good. What should he do ? 

First of all, Philip must unite Greece, he must reconcile 
Argos, Sparta, Thebes, and Athens, and all the rest will be at 
one — everything conspires to help him, the disasters they all 
have suffered, the advantage each will draw from harmony. 
And then he must lead the united peoples on the long-delayed 
crusade against the Persian. Jason won great glory by talking 
of this ; Philip must do it — take the whole of the Persian 
Empire if he can ; if not, then Asia Minor, from Cilicia to 
Sinope, and found new cities there for the wandering and 
broken men, whom poverty will never allow to rest, who 
plunder all they come upon, who grow in numbers that threaten 
to make them as great a danger to Greeks as to barbarians. 
A man of high spirit, who loves Greece, who sees further than 
other men — a man like Philip — will use these roaming men 
against the Persian, will win them land and plant them cities, 
rid them of poverty|and make them a bulwark for all Greece.^ 
In any case, he could set free the Greek cities of Asia. Other 
men, as well as Philip, are descendants of Herakles, but they 
were born to live under laws and constitutions — they must 
love each man that city where he dwells ; ^ *' you as one 

1 Isocrates, Philip, 14, 15. 

2 This comes out still more clearly in the short letter to Philip 
written in ^^y, where he ends by thanking old age for this alone, that 
what he thought and wrote when young, he now sees done in part and 
in part doing by Philip's prowess. 

3 Isocrates, Philip, 120-123. * Isocj:a.tQS, Philip, 127. 



UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ? 399 

born free must, like your ancestor, count all ^Greece your 
country." 

Isocrates, a pedant, a self-conscious stylist, a man of poor 
nature, has somehow hit the world's future as Demosthenes 
did not. Demosthenes loved the city where he dwelt, and 
lived for her. It is hard to imagine anyone who (in Longinus' 
phrase) would choose to be Isocrates rather than Demosthenes ; 
but the course of events fulfilled the dreams of the smaller 
man, so far as the outward look of things went. Alexander 
and Alexandria qmbody his scheme of things for Greece, but 
how different they were from what he dreamed ! What a 
new world they made ! ''All Greece " becomes a world-wide 
" country," and from the Nile westward to the Pacific all 
best minds of the ancient world and the modern draw from her 
inspiration. But the inspiration comes from the men of the 
city-states — the poets and the exiles, the dreamers of dreams — 
the people men laughed at, whom the\7 hated and drove out — 
who cherished impossible ideals of freedom and of human 
character. 

Great treasure halls hath Zeus in heaven, 
From whence to men strange dooms be given, 

Past hope or fear ; 
And the end men looked for cometh not, 
And a path is there where no man thought ; 
So hath it fallen here. 



1 1;, 



i 



INDEX 



Abu-simbel, 39 

Acanthus, 382, 391 

Achaemenians, 14 

Acharnians, no 

Acropolis, 18 

Aeginetans, 134 

Aegospotami, 109, 120, 129, 134, 189, 

228, 267 
Aeschylus, 10, 12, 27, 43, 48 
Agesilaos, 211, 233, 303, 337, 357, 378 
Agis, 304 
Alcaeus, 40 
Alcibiades, 69, 86, 88, loi, 109, 115, 

116-20, 123, 139, 179, 180, 226, 

227, 277, 281 
Alexander the Great, 213, 233, 234, 

294, 300, .366, 399 
Alilat, 203 

Alphabets, 13, 17, 29, 224, 275 
Ammianus Marcellinus, 35 
Amphipolis, 64 

Amyntas of Macedon, 382, 391 
Anaxagoras, 43, 47, 48, 50, 152, 166 
Anaximander, 41 
Andrapodismos^ 134, 135, 257 
Antalkidas, Peace of (King's Peace), 233, 

273, 374, 381, 384 
Antimenidas, 40, 317 
Antisthenes the Cynic, 176, 291-4, 347 
Anytos, 65, 183, 185, 276-8, 281, 282 
ApoUodorus, son of Pasion, 283 ; and 

Chapter X. throughout 
Arcadians, 239, 258, 390, 391 
Archelaos of Macedon, 68, 139, 393 
Archidamos, King of Sparta, 80, 97, 105, 

106 
Archinos, 274, 275 
Argos, 109, 308, 391 
Aristagoras, 213 
Aristarchos, oligarch, 187, 188 
Aristophanes, 56, 80, 96, 97-101, no, 

III, n9, 121, 122, 124, 128-33, 

139-44, 165, 167, 169, 277, 289- 

91, 318, 322, 344, 345, 347 
Aristotle, 86, 120, 345, 351, 353, 369, 

376. See Athenaidn Politeia 
Artaxerxes I, 225, 230 
Artaxerxes II, 213, 230, 396 
Artemisia, $,214 

26 



Assyrian script, 224 

Astronomy, 41, 166 

Athenaidn Politeia (Aristotle's), 190-3 

Athenian Oligarch (author), 53-5, 109, 
169, 186, 308 

Athens. See generally Chapters II. , IV. , 
VI., IX., X., XII. See Com- 
merce, Grain trade, Peiraieus, 
Metics 
Athenian character, 79, 81 ; changes 
in fourth century, 267-73 

— citizenship given to metics, 271, 

275, 318 

— Confederacy, First, 47, 385 

— Confederacy, Second, 385-7 

— Democracy, 51-6, 77, 112, 113, 

176, 184, 185, 187, 270, 273, 274, 
275, 279, 286-90, 295-301 

— education, 131, 165-71 

— Empire, 44, 46, 56, 74, 75, 76, 77- 

81, 104, 108, 225 

— law courts, 327, 328, 333, 334 

— Navy, 44, 107, 109, 121, 122, 123, 

237, 271, 283, 287 

— oligarchic party, 5 3-5, 1 09, III, 

186-9, 273 

— parties, 109-12 
Autopolitanism, 108, 364, 389 

Babylon and Babylonia, 11, 30, 39 
Banking and bankers, 311, 312, 313, 

3175 323 
Bardiya, 14, 207 
Behistun, 14, 206 
Bosporos, 303, 306 
Boucher, Col., 244, 245, 247, 252 
Byzantium, 260, 305, 315, 392 

Cadmus, 29 

Calendar, 223 

Callias, 225, 322 

Callicles (in Gorgias)^ 58, 1 64, 285 

Cambyses, 30 

Camels, 218, 219 

Carians, 3, 20, 125 

Carthage and Carthaginians, 9, 40, 393, 

394 
Cassiterides, 31 
Cavalry, 218 



402 



FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



Cephalos, 70, 122, 317 

Charmides, 185 

Cheirisophus, 240, 250, 258 

Chios, 125, 383 

Chrysostom, 35 

Cilicia, 214, 246, 247 

Cimon, 10, 48, 61, 225 

Circumnavigation of Africa, 31 

City-state, 51-3, 273, 279, 285, 364, 

365, 367, 369, 376, 381, 388, 389 
Clearchus, 239-42, 244, 305 
Cleon, 57, 63-6, 73-7, 87-9, 105, 115, 

116, 158 
Cleophon, 116, 193, 373 
Climates, 4, 13 
Cnidos, battle of, 303, 383 
Coinage, 133, 209, 220, 222, 223, 310, 

Colonization, 261, 262, 366 

Commerce, 44, 45, 121, 219-23, 271, 

272, 283, 304-12, 329, 364, 365 
Conon, 272, 302, 303, 383, 395 
Conservatism, 80, 278 
Corcyra, 45, 76, 10 1 
Corinth, 33, 34, 103, 107, 173, 308, 391 
Cosmetics, 354 
Crates, 181 

Critias, 58, 120, 191, 193, 194, 195 
Crocodiles, 13, 17 
Croesus, 12 
Ctesias, 247 

Cunaxa, battle of, 245, 247 
Custom house, 45 
Cyprus, 214, 394-6 
Cyrus, the elder, 14, 203, 205, 206, 214, 

215 
Cyrus, the younger, 227, 228, 229, 231, 

238-47, 250, 377 

Dances, 255, 256, 265, 347 

Danube, 31 

Darius I, 204, 206-15, 219-24 

Darius II, 213, 230, 238 

Daskyleion, 13, 126, 240 

Datames, 233 

Deceleia, 109, 132, 271, 305 

Delos, 49, 125, 126 

Delphi, 12, 24, 49 

Demaratos, 216, 226 

Democracy, 7, 8, 51-6, 115, 362, 367. 

See Athenian Democracy 
Demosthenes, general, 279 

— orator, 282, 283, 304, 317, 322, 398, 

399 
Derkylidas, 378 
Dio Chrysostom, 256, 257, 354 
Diogenes of ApoUonia, 150, 152 

— of Sinope, Cynic, 293, 294, 296 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 73, 94 

— of Syracuse, 311, 393 
Dionysos, 27, 28 



Egypt and Egyptians, 4, 5, 11, 16-21, 

25-30, 39, 204, 214, 224 
Elateia, 114 
Elis, 175, 339, 372, 373 
Empedocles, 28 
English history, 38, 39, 267-9 
Epameinondas, 387 
Etruscans, 9 
Euripides, 68, 80, 126, 127, 131, 165 

his birth and childhood, 136, 137 

library, 137, 141, 145 

study in cave by sea, 138 

prize for tragedy, 139 

ode for Alcibiades, 139 

leaves Athens, 139 

attacked by Aristophanes, 1 39-43 

reply in Cyclops, 144 

his popularity, 131, 165 

methods in Tragedy, 141 

questions, 137, 139, 144, 145 

reactions against current ideas, 156 

religious ideas, 142, 143, 145-53 

on mystics, 145-7, 150, '51 

views on morals, 147 

philosophy, 145 

on Nature (especially sea), 138, 146 

birds, 161 

feeling for humanity; 160 

on suffering, 150 

on the soul, 1 5 1-4 

on immortality, 152-4 

on woman, 157, 160, 348 

on slavery, 137, 160 

emphasis on fact, 146, 154 

Troades, 157-60 
Euxine (Black Sea), 256 

Greek cities there, 256, 257 

— culture, 256, 303 

sea-faring, 11, 262, 265 

products and trade, 305 
Evadne, 148 
Evagoras of Cyprus, 295, 368, 395, 396, 

397 
Exile and exiles, 3, 64-70, 119, 338, 

339 

Federalism, 367, 385, 386, 389-92 
Fleets, 122-4. See also Athenian 

Navy, Trierarchs 
Four Hundred, the, ill, 186-8, 190 



Geography, 12, 31, 32, 222 

Geology, 25, 42 

Geometry, 29, 166 

Gods, foreign, in Greece, 26, 28, 50, 

126, 127 
Goethe, i, 62, 139, 144, 183 
Gold, 34, 44, 61, 133, 212, 213, 222, 223 
Gorgias of Leontini, 292 
Gorgias, Plato's. See Callicles 



INDEX 



403 



Grain trade, 44, 104, 121, 133, 304-7, 

329, 374 
Granikos, battle of the, 236 
Greeks — 

after Salamis, 37-8 

culture, Panhellenic, 295, 371, 382, 

399 
decline of city-states, 365 
democratic ways, 113, 241-2. See 

also Athenian Democracy 
education of women, 344-9 
exploration, 39-40 
in fourth century B.C., 267 
ideas on manners, 115, 325, 359 
ideas on marriage, 345, 349-54 
ideas on trades, 322, 325 
morality, 118 
Panhellenism, ill, 112 
particularism, 108 
patriotism, d*] 
poverty, 116, 366 

Halicarnassus, 4, 5-7, 10 

Hecataios, 25 

Hegemony, 367 

Heraclitus, 41 

Herakleia, 258 

Hermae, mutilation, 46, 50, 1 18 

Hermippos, 45, 50 

HerodicusofSelymbria, 168 

Herodotus — 

origin, 3 

characteristics, 2, 8, 13, 14, 26, 29, 

32, 35, 36 

travels, 9-13 

his critics, 3, 21, 22, 69, 98 

his study of books, 25, 27 

opinions, 6, 30 

interests, 6, 8, 15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 24/, 
25, 29, 35 

on Democracy, 7, 8, 52 

on Persia, 15, 200, 201 

Persian friends, 8, 13, 14, 15 

admiration of foreigner, 3, 15, 16, 30 

oracles, 12, 24 

religion, 19-29 

alleged cynicism, 22 

irony, 22 

order of his books, 24 

Geography, 31, 32 
Hesiod, 25, 87 
Hippias, 33-5, 308 
Hippocrates of Cos, 393 
Hittites, 18 

Homer, 25, 32, 33, 87, 125, 176, 177 
Hyperbolus, 70, 87, 112, 118 
Hyperboreans, 31 

Immortality, 27, 28, 29, 360 
India, 32, 207, 222 
Interest, rates of, 319 



Ion of Chios, 49, 281 

lonians, 3, 4 

Iphicrates, 280 

Ischomachus, 322, and Chapter XL 

Isocrates, iii, 166, 170, 175, 230, 233, 
240, 267, 272, 282, 286, 287, 288, 
294, 295,310,314, 317, 318, 319, 
331, 366, 368, 369, 370, 373, 374, 
375. 379, 381, 384, 387, 396-9 

Italy,'9, 28 

Jason, of Pherae, 320, 379, 382, 398 

Kalos kdgatkos, 163, 171, 172, 174, 219, 

281, 342, 353 
Kinadon, 375 
Kolaios, 40 
Kurds, 251 

Languages, Greeks and foreign languages, 

13 

Larissa, 239 

Laureion, 44 

Leuctra, battle of, 339, 387, 389 

Libraries, 138 

Libyans, 2, 26 

Lichas, 126, 189, 226 

Lincoln, Abraham, 77, 82, 250 

Liturgies (see also Trierarchy), no, 

122, 273, 318, 320, 326 
Longinus, 33, 94, 158 
Lycia, 214, 224 
Lydians, 12 
Lygdamis, 5-7 
Lysander, 120, 213, 227, 228, 376, 377, 

378, 395 
Lysias, 120, 122, 190, 191, 193, 237, 

273, 274, 288, 317, 329 

Magians, 22, 202, 203 

Mantineia, 109, 237, 374 

Maps, 31, 41 

Marcus Aurelius, 131 

Megalopolis, 390 

Megarian decree, 97-103 

Melos, 56, 74, 75, 134,^135, 159, 164 

Mercenary troops, 39, 40, 232, 237-44, 

257, 397 
Messenia, 47, 106, 367, 388 
Metics, foreigners settled at Athens, 44, 

46, 307, 309, 310, 313, 314, 318, 

319 
Mining, 44, 271 
Mithras, 203 

Mitylene, 74, 75, 134, 392 
Moltke, von, 251 
Mossynoeci, 252 
Mycalessos, 76 
Mysteries, 20, 26-9, 50, 145-7, 150, 151 

Niceratos, 176, 177, 352 



404 



FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP 



Nicias, 55, 64, 73. "^ 

166, 191, 322 
Nile, 16, 25 



7, 125, 134, 



Oceanus, 32 

Olympia, 117, 126 

Olynthian confederacy, 382, 391 

Oracles, 12, 24, 33r 34, I24, I73 

Orpheus and Orphics, 28, 29, 49 

Oxyrhynchus, Hellenica of, 132 

Painting, 137, 138 

Panhellenism. See Greeks 

Pantheia, 352 

Panticapaeum, 304 

Panyasis, 5 

Papremis, battle of, 1 1 

Parasangy 253 

Parsis, 201, 202 

Pasargadae, 202, 205 

Pasion, the banker. See Chapter X. 

generally 
Pausanias, King, 374, 376, 377 
— traveller, 71, 339, 342 
Peiraieus, 122, 123, 195, 307, 308, 321, 

382, 383, 389 
Peloponnesian War, Chapters IV., V., 

VI., 270 
Peneios gulley, 22 
Pericles, 48, 51-3, 67, 97-105, 127, 220, 

345 
Persepolis, 202 
Persians (see Chapter VII.), 2, 15, 16, 

121, 137 
characteristics, 198-200 
dress and equipment, 217, 247 
religion, 15, 201-4, 228 
empire, 207, 208, 231, 232, 246, 257 
government, 207-15, 395 
courtesy, 200, 359 
truth, 15, 200 

language, ii, 13, 224, 227, 253 
inscriptions, 14, 206, 207 
policy toward Greeks, 213, 224, 225, 

226, 233, 260, 302, 366, 377, 380 
Liberals, 7, 13 

Greek criticism of system, 230, 231 
King, 228, 229 
** King's Eye," 211, 226 
King's hoards, 212, 213, 396 
Queens, 229 
army, 217-9 
fleets, 219 
Calendar, 223 

Greek exiles with Persians, 215, 216 
ascendancy in fourth century, 228, 232, 

233, 273, 368 
Greek crusade against Persia, 233, 370, 

379, 380, 384 
Pharnabazos, 210, 211, 227, 233, 272, 

302, 310, 370, 378, 383 



Pheidias, 98, 160, 10 1 

Philip of Macedon, 295, 368, 397, 398 

Phoebidas, 382 

Phoenicians, 29, 31 

Phoenix (bird), 17 

Phormion, the banker, 321-35 

Pindar, 30, 39, 42, 148, 149 

Pisistratus, 33, 44, 125 

Pitanates lochos, 69 

Plato, 29, 41, 50, no, 120, 154, 164, 
168, 278, 281, 284, 285, 287, 296- 
300, 318, 321, 347-9, 371, 394 

Plutarch, 3, 29, 42, 48, 97, 98, 126, 247, 
294, 381 

Polo, Marco, 212 

Polybius, 42, 114, 233, 305, 375 

Pontus. See Euxine 

Porot (pamphlet), 309, 310 

Postal system, Persian, 15, 212, 221 

Praxiteles, 281 

Prince, the, in the Greek world, 367, 380, 
. 393-8 

Prodicos of Ceos, 1 72 

Prophets, 48, 89, 124, 125, 261, 262 

Protagoras, 7, 57 

Pylos, 65, 67 

Pyrene, 31 

Pythagoras, 28 

Red Sea, 31 

Rhampsinitos, 27 

Rhetoric. See Athenian Education 

Rhodes, 383, 389 

Salamis, 35, 37, 136, 138, 3^4 
Samos, 3, 6 
San^ letter, 13 
Satrap, 208, 209, 211, 219 
Satyros, 303, 304, 306 
Scillus, 339-42 
Scythians, 16, 304 

Seuthes, 263-6 y*,. 

Shapur, King, 207 
Simonides, 167 

Slaves, 46, 54, 55, 132, I37, 160, 271, 
284, 287, 291, 313, 315-7, 323, 

324, 335 
Snow-blindness, 253 
Socrates, 41, 57, 163, 165, 166, 168, 

169-71, 174, 176, 178-85, 249, 

276-80, 292, 304, 305, 3", 321, 

353 
Solon, 27, 44, 322 
Sopaios, son of, 302-16 
Sophists and sophistic, 57, 160, 164, 

183 
Sophocles, 2, 32, 48, 49, 127, 186, 345 
Sparta and Spartans, 51, 54, 69, 97, 

102, 103, 105-9, 185, 189, 225, 

239, 251, 258-60, 266, 278, 310, 

339, 364, 36s, 368, 372 



May 



3- m8 



INDEX 



405 



Spartan rule, 258-60, 273, 302, 307, 

372-83, 387 
Sphacteria, 65 
Stoics, 293 
Suez Canal, 221 
Sugar, 2 
Suidas, 3, 5 
Synesius, 257 
SynoecisTHy 389 
Syracusan Expedition, 12, 67, 117-8, 

122, 139, 140, 225, 270 

Ten Thousand, the, 216, 218, and 

Chapter VIII. at large 
Tertullian, 251 
Thales, 41, 386 
Thebes and Thebans, 42, 132, 171,189, 

190, 367, 382, 383, 387, 388 
Themistocles, 10, 89, 276 
Theocritus, 241 

Theophrastus, 282, 311, 312, 331, 332 
Theoric Fund, 332 

Theramenes, 79, 186, 187, 188, 190-3, 318 
Theseus, 331 ; his bones, 48 
Thirty, the, 188, 189, 190, 191, 273, 288, 

297 
Thracians, 76, 133, 239, 255, 263-5 
Thrasybulus, 185, 274-6, 329 
Thrasydaios, 373 
Thucydides, 35, 122, 125, 173, 196 

his origin, 61 

education, 63 

political life, 62-4 

general, 64 

exile, 64-71, 196 

return to Athens, 71, 196 

epitaph on Euripides, 68 

investigations, 67-9 

criticism of Herodotus, 69 

characteristics of mind, 68-71, 76, 81-3 

emphasis on accuracy, 69, 84-6 

his History^ T2--^i 83 ff^ 

style, 74, 81, 93 

grammar, 78, 94 

political ideas, 62, 74, 77-81 

moral feeling, 75, 76, 89 

pathos, 76, 82 

interest in human mind, 70, %^ 

irony, 74, 81 

chronology, 35, 85 

artist, 86 

the speeches, 90-2 

omissions, 87 

abstract ideas, 89, 90 

ancient critics of, 72, 73, 76, 82, 85, 
92, 93» 94 

speeches, 90-2 

influence of tragedy, 93 
Thurii, 8, 9 

Timotheos, general, 280, 286, 320, 321, 
368, 384, 387 



Timotheos, poet, 282, 393 
Tissaphernes, 119, 226, 227, 238, 239, 

240, 257, 377, 378 
Torture in law, 313, 316 
Trapezus, 257 

Trierarchs, no, 122, 123, 329-32 
Troades, 157-60, 189 
Tyrants — 

earlier sense, 5, 6, 8, 33-5, 164 

later sense, 393-8 

Virgil, 131, 156 

Warfare, 217, 218, 219, 233, 244, 245, 

246, 279, 368 
Wealth, standards of, 322 
Wills, 322-3 
Women's education, 344-9 

Xenophanes, 26, 42, 49, 145, 169 
Xenophon, 85, 135, 163, 166, 284, 286, 
37 1 J 372, 390. See Ten Thousand 
early days, 163, 17 1-5 
perhaps prisoner at Thebes, 171 
piety, 173-5, 183, 250, 253, 261, 340, 

359 
interest in country life, 175, 343, 361 
hunting, 177, 178, 210, 246 
library, 361 

relations with Socrates, 178-85 
Memorabilia, 179, i8i, 183 
SymposzufUy I'jG, 292 
political views, 173, 175, 187, 188 
historian, 190-3, 195, 281, 372 
relation to Thucydides, 196 
relation to other writers, 361 
man of letters, 210, 235, 247, 254, 341, 

359 
Anabasis, 235, 236, 266 
joins Cyrus, 241, 249, 337 
on Persia, 200, 201 
as leader, 242, 243, 249, 253 
pseudonyms, 248 
dreams, 250 

in Armenian mountains, 251-4 
at battle of Coroneia, 337, 338 
exiled, 338, 339 
life at Scillus, 339, 343 
Oeconomicos. See Chapter XL at large 
at Corinth, 339, 358 
on household, 350 
tidiness, 355 

on marriage, 350, 351, 352, 353 " 
romance, 352 
his wife, 356 
his sons, 356-9 
on slaves, 360, 361 
Xerxes I, 5, 13, 224, 230, 304 

Zeno, 181, 310 
Zoroaster, 201-4 



I 






Printed by 

Morrison & Gibb Limited 

Edinburgh 



r 



:X' 



4f«B%^ 



.rV 'AT, 



r.t 



.:1;PJ 



,..'1 






■ 


: 'H :' 




:. ."tV-' 


lip 








"■•'■'•r-*'&^ 








. '• v' • •' i 


'•'-* '-^^fe 








*: ', I*. ". 


■ * ^ "iK^ *" 






■^',. 




^^i--*^^ 




•.';■■ " ' . • 


■ 't 


V . . :.:, , "' 


: ..I.' ;^''^ra 






': '.' 


■.^ ■ ■ ./"v- ^ ■ ' 


_; -:*r„J*is^ 




'': '...'■■■•' 


*':■•' 


. ^ ''■"''. 


l-^^^?*-'^ 




• ■ 


'j'. ■ 




"I^^l 




' . '" 


'iP 




;t" ■••],'. ^^1 


. 


• ,' , , 


/:,."." 


-■ '. ."-»''.' ' 


4 f . '<^j^H 




■ " "" 


'■ '•■'.. 


.- , ".' . '^ ' . .' , 


^ '. '^f"'*/'''^^! 


) 




'■'''- '"■ 


',,; :;;' ,. t a- ^ 


;• *_^\:;'? i'^^H 




. ... '.■•.: r 


•' . 


.-■-"■ - ' "^ ^. C*»' » * 


•'■'-'r.i^'^iJiS 


T" 


■■;■.,. '.., \ 


• f-- 


•. ""J, .' . ('■ ^*s 


'Vi.Tf^ir) fsS 




V. • ";• • 




•'; '" '1'-/' •: -^ 


' -' ''"i" <.r''^tA3 


■■ ■;■: ■ 


''.'.' 




■ "'^ :■•■.> _y 


' ' ^^^1 




".•"•:- V.' 


..:■•> 


. :; .■ :^ :.V- . ; • 


;;,/J''-^|^ 


.:..,. '-:• 


i;-;'-,;::!:^^'' ■ 


■'•H'r'. 


■', r. !^::.!''. . % -■''- 


••-■ri^^'i^^PP 




".: ••-'•^v .-f^^--" 


'!'^f.': 


.„;:.:.'. %',; ,.■';'■ ^r 


.^i.-' rV ■•;t'^^:- 




.:--., ^^rt^ -:•. .;•. 


" * ■■ 'V 


..'/."■■ "^ '. <_ ■ ,■ 


. ,-■ ;3.-T.iM *-•,*," 




•;-r|'-:" ':•'• 


--,.:■; 




. .^. ':• -a'' I'' I:- 




.. ;•••/■■ y. .-t 


■ :•!'••:• 


•" •. -."^.^r'' "■/' '.' 


'■. * ''nr-i. 1 ■ 


..".,; 


,: .... ,.. .-■■ : ' 


. .', - 


V. ; ^.., • 





